Allison > Allison's Quotes

“I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Everyone has a time machine. Everyone *is* a time machine. It's just that most people's time machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“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?”
― Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

“Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.”
― Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

“But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“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.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“He is asking to be treated like an American. A real american. Cuz honestly, when you think about American, what color do you see? white? black? We (the Chinese) have been here 200 years....the German, the Dutch, the Italian, they came here in the turn of century; they are Americans. Why doesn't this face ("yellow") register as American? Is it because we make the story too complicated?”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her.”
― Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

“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?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you
might even forget yourself.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“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.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“You came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.”
― Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

“If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“I was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be more, because they see it in me.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“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.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“I CAN'T FORGET. I'M INCAPABLE. THAT MUST BE NICE, BEING ABLE TO FORGET. IS IT NICE?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days.

In other news, once in a lifetime.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“People are dying and my generation just does not care. Including me. But I want to care. I really want to. I want to care so bad.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“The only free man," he would say, "is one who doesn't work for anyone else.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“There are a few years where you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“You are good," I say.
"No I'm not. I'm not I'm not. I'm not," she says. "I'm no good."
And then, softly to herself: "Am I?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“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, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe