Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “She tries so hard to give me what she thinks I want. But all I want is for her to one day come home and tell me that she saw something funny or beautiful or exciting or scary – all I want for her is the ability to tell herself a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “But Jude was always there. He had never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and he had always spent the night in their room, his presence beneath Willem’s bunk as familiar and constant as the sea.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself – they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn’t speak: Farsi, Urdu, Mandarin, Portuguese. Once, he tried to write some things down, thinking that it might be easier, but it wasn’t – he is unclear how to explain himself to himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

456. “He was a chair, a clock, a scarf draped over the back of the settee, something the eye had registered so many times that it now glided over it, its presence so familiar that it had already been drawn and pasted into the scene before the curtain rose.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

457. “He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

458. “But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “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

460. “He has just come home, so exhausted that he feels soluble, as if he is evaporating into the air, so insubstantial that he feels not made of blood and bone but of vapor and fog, when he sees Willem standing before him. He opens his mouth to speak to him, but then he blinks and Willem is gone, and he is teetering, his arms stretched before him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “That I assumed he was going to be one of those typical surgeons – you know, ’not always right, but always certain.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

462. “But maybe, he thinks, maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe he can pretend one more time, and this last bout of pretending will change things for him, will make him into the person he might have been.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

463. “As you get older, you realized that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing... He was, he knew, a simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the most complicated of people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

464. “If he could not have Edward in his arms, he wanted Edward’s name on his tongue; by speaking of him, he would bring Edward alive. He wanted to show him off, wanted to tell anyone who would listen that this was who had chosen him, that this was who he spent his days with, that this was who had brought him alive once again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

465. “They were colors anyone would want to paint.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

466. “And the dead can speak to no one.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

467. “Laws of anything are meant to be pressed against, and stretched, and if they can’t provide solutions to every matter they claim to cover, then they aren’t really laws at all, are they?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

468. “Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

469. “He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence – the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts – could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties’ limits were understood and respected.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

470. “I was so busy building my life only to wake and discover it was over.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

471. “And then Willem said various kind and unbelievable things about his body, which he chose to ignore, because he knew they weren’t true.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

472. “In recent years he has gone from being embarrassed about crying at all to crying constantly to himself to crying around Willem to now, in the final falling away of his dignity, crying in front of anyone, at any time, over anything.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

473. “Harold, Julia – are you kidding? There’s nothing – nothing – I’ve ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought – ” He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

474. “Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

475. “But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

476. “There was a period – or at least you hoped there was – with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

477. “The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

478. “We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

479. “Don’t you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?” But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

480. “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

481. “Science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery. Language could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, its rules imposed or ignored at whim. There was no discipline to it. It seemed sometimes a sort of game made up by man to amuse himself with.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

482. “He felt – though he hesitated to say this about himself: it seemed so bold a statement – mentally healthy.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

483. “He thought of his days the way he thought of taking steps when he was experiencing the pain and numbness in his feet: he would get through one, and then the next, and then the next, and eventually things would get better. Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and accept them and keep going. He always had.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

484. “The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a relationship, and it was awful, and now he will never need to have one again, because he has proven himself incapable of being in one.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

485. “It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won’t be helped while realizing that if you don’t try to help, then you’re not being a friend at all?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

486. “He has always known that if he wanted to be with someone, he would have to make an exchange.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

487. “I did tell her, in that meeting, about that student of mine who had so unnerved me, and she said that she understood exactly what I meant, and that she too had had students – or had simply passed young men in the streets – whom she thought she recognized from somewhere, only to realize later that she had imagined they might be our son, alive and well and away from us, no longer ours, but walking freely through the world, unaware that we might have been searching for him all this time.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

488. “He evaluated the mistakes he had made. He never had known whom to trust: he had followed anyone who had shown him any kindness. After, though, he decided that he would change this. No longer would he trust people so quickly.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

489. “When he at last gave her the statement – which he’d written as plainly as possible, and had imagined while writing it that he was in fact writing about someone else, someone he had known once but had never had to talk to again – she read it through once, impassive, before nodding at him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

490. “He was so far gone from himself, from who he had hoped to be, that it was as if he was no longer a boy at all but something else entirely. This was his life now, and there was nothing he could do about it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

491. “He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it- and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

492. “One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life – its saving, its extension, its return – was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

493. “But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

494. “As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

495. “But math doesn’t have to be convenient, or practical, or managerial – it only has to be true.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

496. “People got used to anything their bodies gave them; he was no exception. If your body was well, you expected it to perform for you, excellently, consistently. If your body was not, your expectations were different.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

497. “He was no one; he was nothing; he was a man who was in love with Edward Bishop and he was, for perhaps the first time in his life, doing something he wanted, something that frightened him, but something that was his own. He was choosing foolishly, perhaps, but he was choosing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

498. “Besides, he didn’t want to relive those years. He wanted to forget them, to pretend they belonged to someone else.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

499. “He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

500. “He snapped on the light next to his side of the bed and tried to read, but all he could see was the razor, and all he could feel was his arms tingling with need, as if he had not veins but circuitry, fizzing and blipping with electricity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara