Quotes from Charles Yu

know, Will. I know. I wish it didn't have to be like this, but you know how it is. You're an Asian Man. Your story was great, while it lasted, but now it's done. I hope our paths cross again. Maybe somewhere else.

The reason no one will rent to them is the color of their skin, and although technically at this point in the story of America this reason for not renting to someone is illegal, the reality is, no one cares. The minor god of immigration has gotten Dorothy this far, but the real estate spirits have failed her. She and Wu rent in the only place they can go, which has the benefit of being a place they can afford. The Chinatown SRO.

The emperor's job was to present these plastic trays of steaming delicacies to a family of blond people somewhere in the middle of America, and then to bow to them, while off-screen, in the shadows, a gong sounded (and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years).

Able to pass in any situation as may be required," she says. "I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I'm one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe." "Must be amazing." "Yeah, I mean, I can be objectified by men of all races.

By putting ourselves below everyone, we're building in a self-defense mechanism. Protecting against real engagement. By imagining that no one wants us, that all others are so different from us, we're privileging our own point of view.

It's not clear if he can dunk (no one's ever seen him try) but he can definitely grab the rim and that alone is pretty impressive given that he's five eleven and three-quarters. —Which, for the record, is the perfect height for an Asian dude. Tall enough for women to notice (even in heels! even White women!), tall enough to not get ignored by the bartender, but not so tall to get called Yao Ming and considered some kind of Mongolian freak.

If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am. from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Her own bedroom, her own bed. Her own yard. Without a restaurant downstairs, or sirens or cops or dead bodies. No fishy garbage fumes, or flumes of mildewing vegetation, no cacophony of five dialects being smashed together, a solid block of sensory overload rising up the dank central corridor of INT. CHINATOWN SRO.

The key question of time travel," my father says, "is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window

The workweek was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death.

1924 U.S. (Federal) Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limits the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. It completely prohibits immigration from Asia.

That is to say, our physical ability to understand time has been honed by evolutionary pressures to select for traits useful for survival, in all aspects, and time perception is no exception or special case or even magical or mysterious case.

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. 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.

Hugh C. Murray of the Cal S. Ct. ruled that the Act of April 16, 1850, Section 14, which forbade "Blacks and Indians" from testifying in favor of or against a white man, was applicable to the Chinese, who were legally Indians because both groups were descended from the same Asiatic ancestors.

She brings seven pairs of underwear, two pairs of shoes. She brings an anxious disposition.

She sat on a worn wooden bench, and read her book, and nibbled on her sandwich. The air was warm syrup, was literally thick with pollen and dandelion clocks and photons moving at the speed of light. An hour passed, then two. I never arrived at the park, wearing the only suit I never had, the one with a hole in the side pocket that no one ever saw.

They're going to shoot him. You have to say something. But how can you? You don't have any lines.

If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience.

Will? What are you doing?" "Being in love with you." "No, you're not. You're falling in love." "Same thing." "Not the same thing," she says. "Falling in love is a story." She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.

To be yellow in America...a special guest star, forever the guest. Fade to black.

She doesn't look at me, but I feel, or maybe I wish or I imagine, that something in the way that she does not look at me is not quite the same. She is not-looking at me in a way that feels like she is consciously not-looking at me. And from the way she is not-looking at me, I can tell she knows that I am trying to not-look at her. We are both not-looking at each other. And yet, there is something in the way she is not-looking at me. For the first time in a long while, I have hope.

Now I fix time machines for a living. To be more specific, I am a certified network technician for T-Class personal-use chronogrammatical vehicles, and an approved independent affiliate contractor for Time Warner Time, which owns and operates this universe as a spatio-temporal structure and entertainment complex zoned for retail, commercial, and residential use.

The problem with unintended consequences isn't with the consequences, it's with the unintended. Just because you didn't' intend for something to happen doesn't mean you didn't want it to.

People rent time machines. They think they can change the past. Then they get there and find out causality doesn't work the way they thought it did. They get stuck, stuck in places they didn't mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn't have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.