Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

2. “You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

3. “And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

4. “There was poetry on the subway. Above the rows of scooped-plastic seats, filling the empty display space between ads for dermatologists and companies that promised college degrees by mail, were long laminated sheets printed with poems: second-rate Stevens and third-rate Roethke and fourth-rate Lowell, verse meant to agitate no one, anger and beauty reduced to empty aphorisms.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

5. “You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

6. “Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law – although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

7. “He will be reminded of how trapped he is, trapped in a body he hates, with a past he hates, and how he will never be able to change either. He will want to cry, from frustration and hatred and pain, but he hasn’t cried since what happened with Brother Luke, after which he told himself he would never cry again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

8. “Harold,” he says, and he hears how awful, how wretched, he sounds, “when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

9. “The best part about going away is coming home.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

10. “His brain was vomiting memories, they were flooding everything else – he thought of people and sensations and incidents he hadn’t thought of in years.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

11. “Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice. Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

12. “The balance – between resignation and hope – shifted by day, by the hour, sometimes by the minute. He was always, always trying to decide how he should be – if his thoughts should be of acceptance or escape.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

13. “Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields... Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

14. “Forgive me, Willem... Forgive me, but I have to leave you now. Forgive me, but I have to go.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

15. “I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

16. “You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

17. “I just feel like I’m going to be this series of nasty surprises for you,” he said at last, and Willem shook his head. “Surprises, maybe,” he said. “But not nasty ones.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

18. “We are so old, we have become young again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

19. “It isn’t only that he died, or how died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

20. “What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

21. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

22. “I have become lost to the world,” he sings, quietly, “in which I otherwise wasted so much time.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

23. “Video, ergo est,” said Laurence, suddenly. I see it, therefore it is.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

24. “Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person – sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty – and you get to pick three of them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

25. “You asked me once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn’t true, and I knew it even as I said it – I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie, and because we were both feeling so wretched, and helpless, and because I thought if I said it, we both might feel better about the situation before us, he situation we perhaps had been capable of preventing – perhaps not – but at any rate hadn’t.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

26. “He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

27. “He was home, and home was Jude.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

28. “He puts Lispenard Street on the floor by his feet. For a long time he sits very still, his eyes closed, allowing his mind to reach back and wander: there is much he doesn’t romanticize about those years, not now, but at the time, when he hadn’t known what to hope for, he hadn’t known that life could be better than Lispenard Street.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

29. “I’m Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

30. “It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

31. “But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

32. “The world has two kinds of people,” Judge Sullivan used to say. “Those who are inclined to believe, and those who aren’t. In my courtroom, we value belief. Belief in all things.” He.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

33. “Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

34. “You spent so much time explaining yourself, your work, to others – what it meant, what you were trying to accomplish, why you were trying to accomplish it, why you had chosen the colours and subject matter and materials and application and technique that you had – that it was a relief to simply be with another person to whom you didn’t have to explain anything.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

35. “None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

36. “The sorrow he felt when he realized that even Willem couldn’t save him, that he was irredeemable, that this experience was forever ruined for him, was one of the greatest of his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

37. “He always had the impression, when waving goodbye to Felix at the end of the afternoon – Felix listlessly raising his own hand before slouching back into the recesses of the entryway – that he never left the house, never went out, never had friends over. Poor Felix: his very name was a taunt.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

38. “He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him – he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

39. “You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry – they don’t happen as often as they should.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

40. “The man has an answer to this question as well. “I’m Willem Ragnarsson,” he says. “And I will never let you go.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

41. “I was aware that I had been looking for him on every street, in every crowd.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

42. “I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protection the most.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

43. “And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

44. “Sometimes it’s because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel... and sometimes it’s because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all – it helps clear them away. And sometimes it’s because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

45. “Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace. But.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

46. “I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

47. “Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

48. “He no longer felt anything for that person, but not feeling anything for that person had been a conscious act of will, like turning away from someone in the street even though you saw them constantly, and pretending you couldn’t see them day after day until one day, you actually couldn’t – or so you could make yourself believe.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

49. “Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

50. “There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”

— Hanya Yanagihara