Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

12. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

14. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

16. “He was home, and home was Jude.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

27. “He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

29. “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

30. “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

31. “He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant. Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn’t so bad after all, and felt better.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

34. “Jude had smiled at him. “Oh, dying,” he said dismissively. We’re all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t happy years, that it wasn’t a happy life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

35. “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

36. “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

37. “I know my life’s meaningful because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

38. “All the most terrifying ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

39. “When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

40. “Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

41. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

43. “It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

44. “But if you act like you don’t belong, if you act like you’re apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

45. “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

46. “But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

47. “Willem listening Jude tell a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

48. “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

49. “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

50. “And, Mr. St. Francis, what happens when we forsake morals in law for social governance? What is the point at which a country, and its people, should start valuing social control over its sense of morality? Is there such a point? I’m not convinced there is.”

— Hanya Yanagihara