Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “For the first time in decades, he isn’t cutting himself at all. If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him. He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “People make it sound so easy, as if the decision to want it is the most difficult part of the process. But he knows better: being in a relationship would mean exposing himself to someone, which he has still never done to anyone but Andy; it would mean the confrontation of his own body, which he has not seen unclothed in at least a decade – even in the shower he doesn’t look at himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “Try not to try too hard; it’s just a lovely ride.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

456. “All you really have to do is be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

457. “Now he hoped to be someone adrift, a presence so thin and light and insubstantial that he seemed to displace no air at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

458. “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

459. “Jude- if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exactly as you are- then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be your fault.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

460. “He knew that making a career as a lawyer meant, sacrifices, either of money, or of moralities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant orbit that had nothing to do with him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

462. “And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

463. “Oh god, he thought, oh god. But it was as if his mind was a bit of machinery caught uselessly in a groove, and he couldn’t think beyond those two words. It was too bright in the waiting room, and he tried to relax, but he couldn’t for the phrase beating its rhythm like a heartbeat, thudding through his body like a second pulse: Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

464. “How can you call yourself a parent if your child feels this way about himself? That was something I would never be able to recalibrate. I suppose – having never parented an adult myself – that I had never known how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent having to do it: I felt only stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it earlier. After all, I had been an adult with a parent, and I had turned to my father constantly.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

465. “These things belonged here, in this house: it was as if the house itself had grown them, as if they were something living that would shrivel and die were they moved elsewhere. And then he thought: was the same not true for him? Was he not also something the house had, if not spawned, then nourished and fed? If he left Washington Square, how would he ever know where he truly was in the world? How could he leave these walls that had stared blankly, plainly back at him through all of his states?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

466. “Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

467. “They spent their days making beautiful things.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

468. “He sensed that JB – who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well – was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

469. “Over their early dinner, he tried to thank Harold again, but every time he tried, Harold stopped him with increasing impatience. “Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?” he finally asked.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

470. “His silence was both a necessity and a protection, and had the added benefit of making him appear more mysterious and more interesting than he knew he was.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

471. “The truth was that I didn’t really feel the need for it; I had never envisioned having a child, I didn’t feel about them one way or another. And that seemed enough of a reason not to: having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

472. “By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

473. “It was as if every aspect of his face was determined to be a soloist, rather than a member of an ensemble.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

474. “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?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

475. “Poor Fa’a,” I said, although my answer was more reflexive than anything else. He was a good, kind person, and although I thought he was being melodramatic, I appreciated his compassion. In the absence of action, Poor Fa’a seemed to be the only thing to say.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

476. “Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world... He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

477. “That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself – after you, after me, after all of who loved him – makes me think that my life has been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

478. “On these days, he succumbed to a sort of enchantment, a state in which his life seemed both unimprovable and, paradoxically, perfectly fixable: Of course Jude wouldn’t get worse. Of course he could be repaired. Of course Willem would be the person to repair him. Of course this was possible; of course this was probable. Days like this seemed to have no nights, and if there were no nights, there was no cutting, there was no sadness, there was nothing to dismay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

479. “Though, of course – if you were here, wouldn’t he still be here as well?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

481. “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

482. “He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. ‘Hemming!’ he shouts, and then, nonsensically, ‘Wait for me!’ And he beings to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet trike the ground beneath him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

483. “In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

484. “He knows how irrational it seems, his desire to keep his legs, his legs that have caused him so many problems, that have cost him how many hours, how much money, how much pain to maintain? But still: They are his. They are his legs.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

485. “I would rather have you suffering and alive-than dead.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

486. “I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life – which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling – was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

487. “I had always been told that I should try to live my life with happiness, but could happiness give you the zeal, the energy, that anger clearly could?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

488. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

489. “And although he hadn’t fretted over whether his life was worthwhile, he had always wondered why he, why so many others, went on living at all; it had been difficult to convince himself at times, and yet so many people, so many millions, billions of people, lived in misery he couldn’t fathom, with deprivations and illnesses that were obscene in their extremity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

490. “In the mornings I could not remember the specifics, only that he was in them and that I was happy, and that the days that followed often felt unbearably dreary and sad, a landscape bled of contentment, and I began to think of them as something to be withstood before I could return to the cosseting blank darkness of night.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

491. “He would have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp that was really more of a glide and to have the face and body that he did.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

492. “The easiest explanations are often the right ones,” his math professor, Dr. Li, always said, and maybe the sam principle applied here. Except he knew it didn’t. Math was one thing. Nothing else was that reductive.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

493. “The point of life is more life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

494. “Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him to want, never occurred to him he might have:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

495. “The mistake that most folks made was assuming that she didn’t see anything sitting at home stringing up her leis. But it wasn’t so; she saw all the wounded birds. She felt their hurt. She knew they had to fight harder to be happy. They were the ones who always held a special place in her heart.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

496. “This wasn’t the version of himself he wanted to paint. But increasingly, he had begun to think this was the version of himself he should paint: this was, after all, his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

497. “And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

498. “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

499. “His father, he knew, had gotten into some sort of trouble in Stockholm – he was never to know what – that had in part encouraged his parents’ move to the States. They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

500. “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