Charles Yu Quotes

If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.

I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

I was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be more, because they see it in me.

Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience... It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you might even forget yourself.

Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.

There is a sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don't know where this is going. I don't know how it ends.

You haven’t experienced awkwardness until you’ve seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?

All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her.

I know none of this seems very believable. It probably doesn't even make sense. But for once in your life, please, I am asking you to trust me. Trust yourself.

On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.

If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it." narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19