“...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.”

“If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it." narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19”

“He was always saying he deserved better. Better than this, anyway. I would nod and agree with him, but I never told him what I wanted to tell him, which was, hey, Deepak, when you say that you deserve better, even if I agree with you, you are kind of also implying that I don’t deserve better, which, maybe I don’t, maybe this is about where I belong in the grand scheme of things, in terms of high-end low-end for me as a person, but I wish you wouldn’t say it because whenever you do, it makes me feel a sharp bit of sadness and then, for the rest of the day, a kind of low-grade crumminess.”

“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.”

“Only, it’s not an it. It’s a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She’s older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of pretty in a melancholy way.”

“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?”

“On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.”

“It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.”

“Things go backward.And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me.”

“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.”

“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.”