Quotes from Charles Yu

April 13, or a November 2? Living like this

Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection.

My manager IMs me. We get along pretty well. His name is Phil. Phil is an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. His passive-aggressive is set to low. Whoever configured him did me a solid. The only thing, and this isn't really that big a deal, is that Phil thinks he's a real person. He likes to talk sports, and tease me about the cute girl in Dispatch, whom I always have to remind him I've never met, never even seen.

Time is a machine; it will convert your pain into experience.

Open a window in the SRO on a summer night and you can hear at least five dialects being spoken, the voices bouncing up and down the central interior courtyard, the courtyard in reality just a vertical column of interior-facing windows,

The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle.

As if I were an incense stick incrementally burning off, first into smoke, and then becoming a part of the room.

And I'll be?" "Whatever you want, man," she says. "A guy can dream," you say. "Cheers to that." You touch your small coffee cups to each other's, a toast to something you both know will never happen.

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire. Not a unidirectional arrow, not causal, as in, desire leads to suffering. Desire is suffering, and therefore, by axiom, suffering is desire.

The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

The son who got As in every subject, including English, now making a living as Generic Asian Man.

But at the same time, I'm guilty too. Guilty of playing this role, letting it define me, internalizing the role so completely that I've lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins.

She is not a could have been. Could have beens are women who are not exactly like my mother. For any given mother, for any given person, there are many could have beens, maybe an infinite number. No, this woman standing in front of me is something else, she is the one and only Woman My Mother Should Have Been, and I have found her. Looking for my father, I have found this woman, I have traveled, chronogrammatically, out of the ordinary tense axes and into this place, into the subjunctive mode.

Now where am I? You're in the interstitial matrix that fills up the space between stories. Who said that? You did. I did? Wait, who am I? You're you. Oh, good. Thanks. Seriously, where are we? We're in a shuttle. I'm taking you back to where you were in story space.

Frustration boils into indignation which condenses into something like, how funny is this shit? Because at some point, this shit kinda is funny.

They don't know what they want. They want cool Asian shit.

Maybe it's the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have.

Sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth, I'll look in the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed.

I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I'm not even particularly good at being myself.

I fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me—I'm not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space–time.

When I am looking through the viewfinder and I have the Frame of Reference filter set just right, I can, if I choose to, relax my mind in such a way as to imagine that I have actually become one with the device, have merged with it, and after a while the distinction between my vehicle and me gets a bit confused. I

This is what I remember: (i) the little pocket of space he creates for me, (ii) how it is enough, (iii) the sound of his voice,

Or rather, a dialogue, between myself and my future self, in which my future self is telling my present self what I have already finished thinking but have not yet realized I thought. This is consistent with Libet (1983).

There's just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it's just easier to keep it how we have it.