Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Who would I be, without this guilt, this sorrow, and the sorrow about the guilt?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “Dit is mijn wereldje, en ik weet niet wat ik er moet beginnen.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us – when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

456. “Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have nothing to write about.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

457. “The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

458. “I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life-food, shelter, weaponry-being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

460. “But he has overseen their house himself, and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says, “I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “He wanted the reminders to stop; he dreaded the day when they would. In recent weeks he’d had the sense that Willem was receding from him, even as his grief refused to diminish in intensity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

462. “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

463. “In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life – all of our lives – as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

464. “For what more could we presume to ask from death – but kindnesss?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

465. “He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

466. “JB’s ambition was fueled by a lust for that future, for his speedy arrival to it; Jude’s, he thought, was motivated more by a fear that if he didn’t move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left...”

— Hanya Yanagihara

467. “How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

468. “It was the worst – the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating – writing experience I’d had... I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I’d somehow become possessed by it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

469. “I love you,” he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

470. “This was what you did for people you loved: you gave them their freedom.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

471. “In Harolds refusal to let go lay a future he couldn’t imagine, one in which someone might want hm for good, and that was a reality that he had never experienced before, for which he had no preparation, no signposts. Harold would lead and he would follow, until one day he would wake and Harold would be gone, and he would be left vulnerable and stranded, in a foreign land with no one there to guide him home.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

472. “Fair is never an answer. But it is always a consideration.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

473. “Did it want confrontation, or soothing, or simply attention? He would determine what sort of hospitality it wanted, and then he would determine how to make it leave, to retreat back to that other place.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

474. “Then there was a fourth theory, invoked by almost all of them when he misbehaved: He was bad, and had been bad from the beginning. “You must have done something very bad to be left behind like that,” Brother Peter used to tell him after he hit him with the board, rebuking him as he stood there, sobbing his apologies. “Maybe you cried so much they just couldn’t stand it any longer.” And he’d cry harder, fearing that Brother Peter was correct.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

475. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

482. “Watching his parents around Hemming bothered him, in part because although they never behaved objectionably, he could tell that they viewed Hemming as their responsibility but no more.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

483. “It’ll never be this bad,” Ana used to say to him in the hospital. “Things’ll never be this bad again,” and although he knew she meant the pain, he also liked to think she meant his life in general: that with every year, things would get better.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

484. “And now Charles’s world had become his world as well, and for the first time in their friendship there was a trench, and there was no way for her to come to him, and no way that he could return to her.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

493. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

500. “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