{"author":"Charles Yu","author_id":"Charles+Yu","total_quotes":27,"quotes":[{"text":"I hope you read this, whoever you are, and imagine that there is a hypothetical person out there who needs your love, has been waiting silently, patiently for it all his life, is flawed and downright ugly at times and yet would have just eaten up any tiny bit of affection you had been willing to give, had you ever stopped your own happy life to notice. And then imagine that this hypothetical person is real, because he probably is.... Wish I’d met you. Wish I wasn’t your hypothetical. But you’re reading this, which means a few minutes ago, I went into that bathroom and pulled the trigger. You probably heard it. Sorry. You’re welcome. Thank you. And please. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["affection","loneliness","love","relationships","suicide"],"id":7030,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"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?","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["conscience","goodness","morality","people"],"id":31095,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["bad-news","change","chronodiegetic-manipulation","good-news","life","the-universe","time-travel"],"id":87534,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["heart","life","storytelling","truth","writing"],"id":91132,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["dogs"],"id":131158,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"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.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["trust","trust-yourself"],"id":141301,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"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.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["mothers","worry"],"id":165546,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["code-jockeys","developers","engineers","expertise","language","logic"],"id":168194,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["feelings","life"],"id":169493,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"},{"text":"There must be some kind of internal time distortion effect in here, because when I look at myself in the little mirror above my sink, what I see is my father's face, my face turning into his. I am beginning to feel how the man looked, especially how he looked on those nights he came home so tired he couldn't even make it through dinner without nodding off, sitting there with his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing - or giving up - its tiny quantum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe.","author":"Charles Yu","tags":["father","mirror","quantum-of-heat","soup","tiredness"],"id":173945,"author_id":"Charles+Yu"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":27,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}