How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience.

Dog sighs are some form of distilled truth.

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

I don’t know what I would do without you. I don’t know what I will do without you. I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar.