Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “He had felt, then, a great surge of gratitude, because he knew Andy didn’t think it looked good, would never think it looked good. To Andy, his body was an onslaught of terrors, one against which the two of them had to be constantly attentive. He knew Andy thought he was self-destructive, or delusional, or in denial.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

452. “But you need someone who can grow old with you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

453. “You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap – if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

456. “People adore nothing more than to speak of themselves, and if you ever find yourself in a circumstance in which you fear your place or standing then all you must do is ask the other person something about him or herself, and they will forever after be convinced that you are the most fascinating individual they have ever encountered.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

457. “But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real. In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

458. “Who would I be, without this guilt, this sorrow, and the sorrow about the guilt?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

464. “Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. I cannot promise that my granddaughter won’t be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone. I have made certain that her life will have a witness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

471. “An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

472. “He thought about how he could start, and plotted what he’d say in his head before he opened his mouth. Finally, he was ready. “I was always a greedy kid,” he began, and across the table, he watched Willem lean forward on his elbows, as for the first time in their friendship, he was the listener, and he was being told a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

473. “Concepuseram impreuna un om si impreuna il vazuseram murind. Uneori aveam impresia ca exista o legatura fizica intre noi, o franghie lunga, intinsa intre Boston si Portland; cand ea tragea de capatul ei, simteam eu socul in capatul meu. Oriunde se ducea ea, oriunde mergeam eu, firul acela dublu era acolo, tras si intins, fara a se rupe insa vreodata, incat fiecare clipa ne reamintea de ceea ce nu puteam sa mai avem vreodata.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

474. “As the months and then the years passed, they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the manufacturer’s box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

475. “On and 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

476. “If he was standing still, he could be anyone, someone blank and invisible.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

480. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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