Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “He will study the back of Jude’s head, because Jude can’t face him, and imagine the person he thinks he knows collapsing into rubble, clouds of dust gusting around him, as nearby, teams of artisans try to rebuild him in another material, in another shape, as a different person than the person who had stood for years and years. On and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor: blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “And yet he wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans,” he said. “Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I’m not sure what’s going on with you lot. You’re making money. You’ve achieved something. 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

454. “He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn’t say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

456. “Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

458. “It is wonderful, and rare, being out of the city, being back at their house, and the four of them enjoy one another’s company. He even feels well enough to give Andy an abbreviated tour of the property, which Andy has visited only in springtime or summer, but which is different in autumn: raw, sad, lovely, the barn’s roof plastered with fallen yellow gingko leaves that make it look as if it’s been laid with sheets of gold leaf.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “When Jacob was a baby, I would find myself feeling more assured with each month he lived, as if the longer he stayed in this world, the more deeply he would become anchored to it, as if by being alive, he was staking claim to life itself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

460. “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

461. “Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

466. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

479. “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

480. “Was this what being a child with a parent was like? Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!”

— Hanya Yanagihara

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

494. “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

495. “I found, tucked between two books, two envelopes, our names in his handwriting. I opened my envelope, my heart thrumming, and saw my name – Dear Harold – and read his note from decades ago, from the day of his adoption and cried, sobbed, really, and then I slipped the disc into the computer and heard his voice, and although I would have cried anyway for its beauty, I cried more because it was his. And then Julia came home and found me and read her note and we cried all over again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

496. “Every day, he thought about it, and thinking about it made things easier. Thinking about it gave him fortitude.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

497. “They are bound to each other by their mutual disgust and discomfort: Caleb tolerates his body, and he tolerates Caleb’s revulsion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

498. “But she didn’t read to him, or talk to him, or go on walks with him the way Willem did.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

499. “In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

500. “James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton.”

— Hanya Yanagihara