Charles Yu experiments with form and genre to explore the stories we tell ourselves while navigating contemporary life. In "Third Class Superhero," a would- be good guy must come to terms with the darkness in his heart. A couple living in the Luxury Car Commercial subdivision in "401(k)" are... read more
“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 only take us so far, but for now it propels us higher and higher and higher.”Nathan/Moisture Man
“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.”Eric, 27, investment banker
“Some marriages are driven by love, some by gravity.”
Buying things we don't want to feel closer to the things we know we can't get.Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
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.Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
'English' is actually two completely different languages, one spoken by women and the other by men, or one by men and the other by men, or one by women and the other by women—theHighlighted by 6 Kindle customers
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.Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
We go weeks, years, putting off whatever it was we had started doing when we first started out doing whatever we had intended to do.Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
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.Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
In other words, there is the language of the wanted and the language of the one doing the wanting, and the confusing thing is that they are exactly the same in terms of lexicographical content, grammatical structure, rules of punctuation, and even pronunciation. The difference is solely in meaning.Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
I have a hangover that feels like someone let a cat loose inside my face.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
And it occurs to him that things don't just occur to people, like in stories. People always know everything there is to know about themselves, never any less. Everything is a secret that everyone knows. A secret that no one knows they know. To smile is the greatest mystery possible, to smile is to tell a secret, is to tell a lie from your head and a truth from your heart together, in one word—the conjugation of the terrifying present, the perfect past, the conditional future all in a single wordless word in the eternal, tenseless grammar.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
My wife wants me to quit. She says it's killing me. She's wrong. It's already killed me.Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Story 1 Third Class Superhero
Story 2 401(k)
Story 3 The Man Who Became Himself
Story 4 Problems for Self-Study
Story 5 My Last Days As Me
Story 6 Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation
Story 7 Realism
Story 8 Florence
Story 9 Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation
Story 10 32.05864991%
Story 11 Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction
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