119 Quotes by Charles Yu

Downtown may be gritty and dark and full of evil but on some level an unspoken belief, a faith that we live in a manageable world with its own episodic rules and conventions: Life takes place one hour at a time. Clues present themselves in order, one at a time. Two investigators, properly paired, can solve any mystery.

Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?

Sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth, I’ll look at 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.

How many times have I failed before? How many times have I stood here like this, in front of my own image, in front of my own person, trying to convince him not to be scared, to go on, to get out of this rut? How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how may self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?

You lie awake, staring through a small open window at a full blue moon complete with a silly face. This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say the better. Try to project: responsible, harmless. An unthreatening amount of color sprinkled in. That’s the dream. A dream of blending in. A dream of going from “generic Asian man” to just plain “generic man”.

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

The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by, and not getting by.

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.

But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.