119 Quotes by Charles Yu

This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?

The heart of the show, Black and White is 'dunt eat too much Chinese food.

And there’s just something about Asians — their faces, their skin color — it just automatically takes you out of this reality. Forces you to step back and say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this? What kind of world are we in? And what are these Asians doing in our cop show?

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.

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

......cut us off from our families, our history. So we made it our own place - Chinatown. A place for preservation and self-preservation; give them what they feel what's right, is safe; make it fit the idea of what is out there..Chinatown and indeed being chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning a construction,a performance of features, gestures, culture and exoticism, invention/reinvention of stylization.

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.

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 moment back as its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

I’m not a superhero. I’m background. I’m a good person wrapped in mediocre soul. I want to be better. I really do. But even now in my greatest moment I know this is as good as it will ever get for me and it’s not that good. I have a small heart, a dark heart, a heart filled with exactly equal amounts of good and evil, one that is weak and will take us only so far, but for now it propels us higher and higher and higher.