Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Willem had always been careful not to express too much interest in exploring the many cupboarded cabinet in which Jude had secreted himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was almost as good as the real thing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “Would he someday have the courage to give up, and would he be able to recognize that moment, or would he wake one day and look in the mirror and find himself an old man, still trying to call himself an actor because he was too scared to admit that he might not be, might never be?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand. But.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he’d had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

457. “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

458. “This was part of their game that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t know.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “You were the one who got furthest with him. But I know you blamed yourself. I blamed myself, too. Because I did something worse than accepting it: I tolerated it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “He was aware, suddenly, of how exhausted, how utterly depleted he was, as much by the past few weeks of anxiety as well as the past thirty years of craving, of wanting, of wishing so intensely even as he told himself he didn’t care, that by the time they had toasted one another and first Julia and then Harold had hugged him – the sensation of being held by Harold so unfamiliar and intimate that he had nearly squirmed – he was relieved when Harold told him to leave the damn dishes and go to bed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

462. “I think his craziness is all man-made.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

463. “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.” At the time, he’d laughed and called her melodramatic, and a reactionary man-hater, but that night, as he lay in bed, he had thought about what she said and wondered if she was correct.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

464. “Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and accept them and keep going. He always had.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “But there is a moment before they begin heading uphill and Jude begins walking toward them in which they all hold their positions, and it reminds him of a set, in which every scene can be redone, every mistake can be corrected, every sorrow reshot. And in that moment, they are on one edge of the frame, and Jude is on the other, but they are all smiling at one another, and the world seems to hold nothing but sweetness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

471. “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

472. “And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

473. “His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling – as he often did – as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

474. “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

475. “What about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he knew enough by then – he was a fast learner – to simply shrug and say, with a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” He was astonished but relieved by how easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

476. “It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

477. “And then they were gone, in a last round of embraces and goodbyes that included David in gesture if not in warmth or spirit.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

478. “The messages were brief, and unrevealing, but he played them over and over, weeping, bent double with grief, the messages’ very banality – “Hey, Judy. I’m going to the farmers’ market to pick up those ramps. But do you want anything else? Let me know” – something precious, because it was proof of their life together.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

479. “However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

480. “At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

481. “He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and harder it was to find your way back.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

482. “At his age, the only truly important aspects of one’s identity were sexual prowess; professional accomplishments; and money.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

483. “Part of him realizes, he had always thought it would be better as an adult, as if somehow the mere fact of age would transform the experience into something glorious and enjoyable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

484. “I admired how rapidly, how fluidly, she was adjusting to the fact that the child she thought she would have was not the child she did have.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

485. “He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday – cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold – and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

486. “Normally at parties he grabbed or was grabbed by a group of people, and spent the night as the nuclei for a variety of three- or foursomes, bounding from one to the next, gathering the gossip, starting harmless rumors, pretending to share confidences, getting others to tell him who they hated by divulging hatreds of his own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

487. “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

488. “I guess I just don’t think that sort of thing is for someone like me.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

490. “It is still an unfamiliar feeling to have so much space, and a stranger one to be able to afford it. But you can, he has to remind himself sometimes...”

— Hanya Yanagihara

491. “Ever since their relationship has changed from what it had been into what it now is, their conversations have become both more intimate and more mundance, and that final weekend is always a perfect, condensed reflection of that: Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

492. “It was a time he rarely thought about, his flight to Philadelphia, because it was a period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; there had been times in those weeks when he had opened his eyes and was genuinely unable to discern whether what had just happened had actually happened, or whether he had imagined it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

493. “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 assuming the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “Their participation in these parties were a kind of theater that the four of them agreed to stage for themselves, but once one of the actors left the stage, there seemed little point in continuing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

498. “He had always felt bound to Willem by the big things – love; trust – but he likes being bound to him by the small things as well: bills and taxes and dental checkups.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

500. “He knew what the houses meant to Malcolm: they were an assertion of control, a reminder that for all the uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate perfectly, that would always express what he was unable to in words.”

— Hanya Yanagihara