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Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

Charles Yu

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Charles Yu
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
You Chaokai
You Zhaokai
Dialogue
Exactly
Coming
Future
Self
Going
Years
Extended
Life
Extent

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We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think.
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You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.
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You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.
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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.
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I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.
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If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.
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Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren't the one saving the galaxy, you might as well be eight feet tall and covered with hair.
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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.
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At some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.
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Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.
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All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.
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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.
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It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.
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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?
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What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different?
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