Third Class Superhero Quotes

“I felt melancholy, I felt joy, I felt dread, I felt a sadness so deep it cannot be described in words. I felt emotions that have not been given names, I felt emotions that have been given the wrong names, I saw what it meant to feel and I saw that it was all the same feeling and I felt big feelings, the old feelings, the ones before language, before the mind had language, before the mind had learned to tell a fake story called consciousness and developed anxiety when it invented time, and danger, and risk, and probability, and the future.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No matter how close they are, they are not here. What they said, when they said it, it is not now.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Her love for him is not something that can be changed— it’s physics, not emotion: It’s the exact weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“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

“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.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero

“He calls the front desk. The stringy-haired girl-woman picks up, talks low and close to the phone, as if preparing to tell a secret, as if everything might be a secret.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“2. Most of the commercial systems out there use an artificial intelligence program called a logic-plus-intuition engine, or LPI. 3. The way an LPI works is this: a. You don't need to know how an LPI works. b. You wouldn't understand anyway.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“A Jehovah's Witness once showed up on a nearby moon and beamed me. I waited underground until he went away. Twenty years I waited.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“I tell her ennui is an emotion for rich people. It is like boredom, but more refined, like high-thread-count bed-sheets.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Everything that will ever happen has already happened. Xeno's Arrow doesn't really ever move.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Seven thousand five hundred statements Wally made were true, one thousand five hundred were false, sixty statements were both true and false, ten statements were neither true nor false, one statement was false and beautiful, one statement was neither true nor false nor beautiful, but it was funny and sad and sweet and, on top of it all, grammatically correct.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Five-year-olds are playing soccer nearby. More specifically, they are viciously kicking one another in the shins while a soccer ball sits unharmed in the vicinity. Once in a while one of them inadvertently kicks the ball, causing a considerable amount of confusion. But mostly they leave the ball alone.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Assume you are of average strength. Assume you are of above-average compassion, patience, will, and determination.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“(c) Every night for a year, A and B eat dinner in silence. Every night for a year, A lights a cigarette, opens a beer, goes to the garage to work on his imaginary spaceship. Sometimes, he has doubts. Sometimes, he gets frustrated, wondering if it is worth all the imaginary trouble. (d) And then, one day, A finishes his spaceship. Even imaginary work pays off.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“8. PARTIAL, SOLUTIONS (a) renovate the kitchen; (b) renovate themselves; (c) go on safari; (d) go to a "seminar"; (e) make large purchases of luxury durable consumer goods; (f) make small overtures to an object of lust at work; (g) take up golf; (h) find a disorder and self-diagnose; (i) get a purebred dog; (j) get religion; (k) landscape the backyard; (l) have another child.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“He had once cared. Cared deeply and, if not deeply, then, at the very least, cared mildly. Cared in an abstract, willing-to-sign-a-petition, NPR-listener sense of caring.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“You have great hands," I tell the masseuse. The masseuse says: I dream of the invisible hand. I want to outsource my manufacturing. I want to protect my family from unforeseen risks. I want to incorporate a transaction vehicle to effect a tax-free 368(a) reverse triangular merger. I want to define the boundaries of tomorrow. I want to live life one choice at a time. I want to map the possible. I want to test the untestable. I want to measure the profound. I want to fathom the unfathomable. I want what I want. A wholly owned subsidiary of Global Risk International. More than life insurance, less than a mutual fund.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“We choose a package deal with Authentic Experiences™. According to the brochure, there are five kinds of Experience: Urban, Rural, Semirural, Ethnic, and Ethnic with Danger.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“My wife wants me to quit. She says it's killing me. She's wrong. It's already killed me.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Buying things we don't want to feel closer to the things we know we can't get.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“All three of them are out there, stretching on the mountaintop. Their muscles are all so perfect. They stretch their hamstrings. They flex and loosen their granite-like quadriceps, massage their balloon-shaped deltoids. That is what a costume is supposed to look like, I think, when it fits. That is what a superhero looks like. The reason they have better lives than I do is because they are better people. They're more this, more that, more strong, fast, smart, kind, forgiving. They're more everything. What do I have more of? What do I do better than anyone else in the world?”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Inside the exam room, sixty of us are crammed together at twenty desks. It is hot and people keep shifting around. The proctor explains the rules: three hours of multiple choice, an hour of true/false, and then ninety minutes of moral quandaries.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Thing is, I believe Henry when he says he never laid a hand on anyone. I believe him, if only because Henry is the laziest person I've ever met. He only wanted to destroy himself.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Seuls deux types de personnes vivent dans la métropole : les super-héros ratés et les vieux messieurs qui vivent dans l’appartement du dessus.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“1) Je ne suis pas un super-héros. 2) Il faut que j’aille travailler. 3) Si je ne devais pas aller au travail, alors je pourrais être un super-héros. 4) Si j’étais un super-héros, je ne serais pas obligé d’aller bosser.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero: Heartbreaking and Hilarious Experimental Short Stories About Contemporary Existence

“Henry's not a good guy. He's getting the life he deserves and most days he seems okay with that. I forget that the majority of people don't want special powers, like Henry, who can just barely handle being normal.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero

“My power, if you can call it that, and I don't think you can, is that I am able to take about two gallons of water from the moisture in the air and shoot it in a stream or a gentle mist. Or a ball. Which is useful for water-balloon fights, but not all that helpful when trying to stop Carnage and Mayhem from robbing a bank.”
― Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero