Leptons: the free ones
The leptons are the fermions that ignore the strong force. Three carry electric charge $-1$: the familiar electron, the muon (about 200 times heavier), and the tau (heavier still). Each pairs with an electrically neutral neutrino. The muon and tau are unstable and decay in microseconds or less, which is why the everyday world is built from electrons alone.
Neutrinos are almost nothing: no charge, a mass so tiny it was long thought to be zero, and interacting only through the feeble weak force. Trillions stream through your thumbnail every second, essentially all passing straight through the Earth. Detecting them at all is a heroic experimental feat.
Quarks: the confined ones
The six quarks are the strangest fundamental particles because they carry fractional electric charge. The up-type quarks (up, charm, top) carry +\tfrac23; the down-type quarks (down, strange, bottom) carry -\tfrac13.
The two charge families of quarks, in units of the elementary charge e.
Quarks carry something leptons lack: colour charge, the source of the strong force, coming in three varieties (labelled red, green, blue — a name, not a real colour). Colour is why quarks bind so ferociously, and why, as we will see, they can never be pulled apart.
Building hadrons: confinement
Because of colour, free quarks are never seen. Only colour-neutral combinations exist in isolation — a fact called confinement. These composite objects are the hadrons: baryons, made of three quarks (one of each colour), and mesons, made of a quark and an antiquark (colour plus anti-colour).
The proton and neutron are the baryons you are made of. The proton is uud and the neutron is udd — and their charges come straight from adding up the quark charges, a beautiful consistency check on the whole picture.
Proton and neutron charges built from their quark content.
Antimatter and the fermion rules
Every fermion has an antiparticle with the same mass and spin but opposite charge and quantum numbers. Dirac predicted the positron — the electron's antiparticle — from his equation years before it was found. When a particle meets its antiparticle they can annihilate, converting their combined mass entirely into energy.
Being fermions, matter particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle: no two identical fermions can occupy the same quantum state. This one rule stacks electrons into atomic shells, giving chemistry its structure, and holds up white dwarfs and neutron stars against gravity. Force bosons, by contrast, pile happily into the same state — which is what makes a laser possible.