Charles Yu

Charles Yu

Author

Charles Yu is a celebrated author known for his exploration of identity and culture in works like 'Interior Chinatown', which examines Asian American experiences.

People Self Heart Moving Want Lying
Born
May 12, 1985
Quotes
38
Rank
#3272

Quote collection

Charles Yu quotes (page 2 of 2)

38 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Charles Yu Author
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"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?"

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

Might Forget Invisible
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"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."

Men Self Avoiding
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"This, then, is my choice: I can allow the events of my life to happen to me. Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure."

Choices Risk Events
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"Worry was my mother's mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future."

Mother Past Anchors
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"What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different?"

Memories Rolling Different
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"You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?"

Lying Heart Night
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"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."

Memories Regret Taken
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"I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write."

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

Three Pieces Dollars
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"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."

Suicide Running Tired
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"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."

Ends I Am Pretty Know How
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"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?"

Scared Convince Being Afraid
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"You can only go to places that you will let yourself go."

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"All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things."

Heart Ideas People
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"I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process."

Confused Fall Climbing
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"All anyone is to anyone is a series of days."

Series
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"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."

Self Years Life Is
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