Top 90 Charles Yu Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time. He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.”

— Charles Yu

52. “Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. Superfluous. Gratuitous. He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva. And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.”

— Charles Yu

53. “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?”

— Charles Yu

54. “The thing about building a castle in the air is it’s easy. You build up. It’s like a little ladder, then you start building a castle in the air. Then, you destroy the ladder. And your castle is floating.”

— Charles Yu

55. “He’d always be Your Father, but somehow was no longer your dad.”

— Charles Yu

56. “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.”

— Charles Yu

57. “They’d lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by.”

— Charles Yu

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

— Charles Yu

59. “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.”

— Charles Yu

60. “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.”

— Charles Yu

61. “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.”

— Charles Yu

62. “The apologies, the true sign – that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is.”

— Charles Yu

63. “There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”

— Charles Yu

64. “He allowed it to happen, allowed himself to become “generic”, so that no one could even tell what was happening. He is guilty, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to become a part of something that never wanted him. The defense rests.”

— Charles Yu

65. “Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?”

— Charles Yu

66. “The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn that all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.”

— Charles Yu

67. “Lying there in the silence, you try to imagine what she could possibly mean. Kung Fu Guy is the pinnacle. How could anyone be more?”

— Charles Yu

68. “All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.”

— Charles Yu

69. “If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he’d find a way in.”

— Charles Yu

70. “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.”

— Charles Yu

71. “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.”

— Charles Yu

72. “Even now, as Special Guest Star, even here, in your own neighborhood. Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here. Who you are. All you are. Your most salient feature, overshadowing any other feature about you, making irrelevant any other characteristic. Both necessary and sufficient for a complete definition of your identity:.”

— Charles Yu

73. “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.”

— Charles Yu

74. “Able to pass in any situation as may be required,” she says. “I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I’m one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.”

— Charles Yu

75. “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?”

— Charles Yu

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

— Charles Yu

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

— Charles Yu

78. “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.”

— Charles Yu

79. “She whispers to you: Let me do the talking. You nod, unsure why you’re going along with her, oh yeah, you are probably in love with her already, that’s why.”

— Charles Yu

80. “But the experience of Asians in America isn’t just a scaled-back or dialed-down version of the Black experience. Instead of co-opting someone else’s experience or consciousness, he must define his own.”

— Charles Yu

81. “He thinks he can’t participate in this race dialogue, because Asians haven’t been persecuted as much as Black people.”

— Charles Yu

82. “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”.”

— Charles Yu

83. “Working your way up the system doesn’t mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It’s what the system depends on.”

— Charles Yu

84. “If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver.”

— Charles Yu

85. “She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.”

— Charles Yu

86. “He’d aged out of his role and into the next one, his life force depleting with every exertion. Wisdom and power leaking from him with each passing day and night. He’d played his role for so long he’d lost himself in it, before some separation that happened gradually over decades and then you waking one day to feel it, some distance that had crept in overnight. Some formal space you could no longer cross.”

— Charles Yu

87. “To have lived an entire life of productivity, of self-sufficiency, having been a net giver, never a taker, never relying on others. To call oneself master, to hold oneself out as a source of expertise, to have had the courage and ability and discipline that added up to a meaningful, perhaps even noteworthy life, built over decades from nothing, and then at some point in that serious life, finding oneself searching for calories.”

— Charles Yu

88. “Should have made you a bet, because, hey, guess what, got a loaded gun in my underwear so it tuns out I was right. Not that I can complain. Had some good years. My life, in a nutshell: 0-8 yrs. happy, no reason; 9-19 happy, wrong reasons; 20-33 unhappy for all the right reasons, 34 to present moment, unhappy, looking for a reason.”

— Charles Yu

89. “Your relationship having turned into a pantomime, a series of gestures in a well-worn scene, played out again and again, any underlying feeling having long since been obviated by emotional muscle memory, learning how to make the right faces, strike the right poses, not out of apathy or lack of sincerity, rather a need to preserve what was left of his pride.”

— Charles Yu

90. “The pain of having once been young, with muscles, still able to work. To have lived an entire life of productivity, of self-sufficiency, having been a net giver, never a taker, never relying on others.”

— Charles Yu

91. “She brings seven pairs of underwear, two pairs of shoes. She brings an anxious disposition.”

— Charles Yu

92. “Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have.”

— Charles Yu

93. “Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. You’re not Kung Fu Guy. But maybe, just maybe, tomorrow will be the day.”

— Charles Yu

94. “Bruce Lee was the guy you worshipped. Older Brother was the guy you dreamt of growing up to be.”

— Charles Yu

95. “By putting ourselves below everyone, we’re building in a self-defense mechanism. Protecting against real engagement. By imagining that no one wants us, that all others are so different from us, we’re privileging our own point of view.”

— Charles Yu

96. “This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it’s across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance.”

— Charles Yu

97. “After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?”

— Charles Yu

98. “It’s the way things are. You do the cop show. You get your little check. You wonder: Can you change it? Can you be the one who actually breaks through?”

— Charles Yu

99. “Better to be a legend than a star.”

— Charles Yu