Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “Around her he had felt none of the constant anxiety, nor watchfulness, that he seemed condemned to feel around everyone else; the vigilance was exhausting, but it eventually became simply a part of life, a habit like good posture.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “And even before I knew what his smile looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “He wasn’t like Harold or Citizen – he was practical; he knew that making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities, but it still troubled him, this forsaking of what he knew to be just.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

456. “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

457. “He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was – terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing – he felt with Caleb.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

458. “He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvellous years were not behind them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “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

460. “Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feels sorry for him because they assume his singlehood is not his decision but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from ‘Frog and Toad,’ and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB’s studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts – a second heart, a second brain – to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

470. “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

471. “He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be; even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he would become.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

472. “He was using himself to save himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

474. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

476. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

478. “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

479. “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

480. “I don’t think the reader needs protecting. If you guide the reader steadily, they’ll follow you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

481. “Annika parlava a macchinetta e doveva aver deciso che la strategia migliore fosse trattare Willem come un’eclissi, limitandosi a non guardarlo.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

482. “But although he hadn’t been convinced, it was somehow sustaining that someone else had seen him as a worthwhile person, that someone had seen his as a meaningful life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

483. “As you got 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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

484. “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

485. “Poor house! I thought, and at moments I would find myself stroking one of its whitepainted doorframes as if I were petting a horse’s nose: gently, slowly, trying to soothe it back to calmness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

486. “Jude seemed so confident, so competent, so certain that he, too, had something to offer.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

487. “It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

488. “Era capaz de diagnosticar con exactitud el estado en que cada uno de ellos se hallaba, pero incapaz de tomar decisiones.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

489. “Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

490. “But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

491. “He wasn’t stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

492. “There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

493. “He liked to pretend he was one of them, but he knew he was not.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

494. “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

495. “In later years, I would think: If only we had had a few more weeks with him close to our side, away from the word; if only we could have convinced him that safety was valuable, and that we could be the ones to provide it to him. But we hadn’t had a few more weeks, and we hasn’t been able to convince him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

496. “What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

497. “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

498. “The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they’d told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude’s father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

499. “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

500. “He always forgot; he was always made to remember.”

— Hanya Yanagihara