119 Quotes by Charles Yu

It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be; you couldn’t help but hate her for doing that to herself, and at the same time hate yourself for giving in to it, and underneath all of that, despite your hate for her, couldn’t help but love her.

The path of a man’s life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn’t anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man’s ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history.

Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for the re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.

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.

I have a hangover that feels like someone let a cat loose inside my face.

He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim.

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.

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, unprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind.