Su Reis > Su's Quotes

“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

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

“How many times have I failed before? How many times have I stood here like this, in front of my own image, in front of my own person, trying to convince him not to be scared, to go on, to get out of this rut? How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how may self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

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

“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

“Dog sighs are some form of distilled truth. What does he know? What do dogs know? Ed sighs like he knows the truth about me and he loves me anyway.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Ever catch yourself in the middle of saying something you know you'll regret? Something so mean you know you should stop immediately but some part of your brain kicks in and won't let you stop?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how many self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in gauze, insistent, urgent, impatient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant, state or emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever”
― Bob Hicok

“I love how intimate I've become with failure.”
― Bob Hicok

“In other languages,
you are beautiful- mort, muerto- I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone- picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin- what I hate
about stars is they’re not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you
you’re not those candles either, how often I realize
I’m not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I’d be cancer, if you
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say.”
― Bob Hicok

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski

“Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The Beautiful Poem"

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.

Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.”
― Richard Brautigan, The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

“Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé.”
― Alphonse de Lamartine

“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Don't forget that I cannot see myself, that my role is limited to being the one who looks in the mirror.”
― Jacques Rigaut

“All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle...is another riddle.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.”
― Anne Sexton