Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

454. “There is a point – for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago – when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “Sometimes he found himself resenting the others’ definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

459. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

461. “There is one drawing of him that is very small, on a postcard-size piece of paper, and when he examines it more closely, he sees that something had been written on it, and then erased: ‘Dear Jude,’ he makes out, ‘please’ – but there is nothing more after that word.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

476. “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

477. “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

478. “People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive, a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph to the upper right.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

483. “And yet somehow in the past seven months he had decided that he was going to repair Jude, that he was going to fix him, when really, he didn’t need fixing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “To be a scientist is to learn to live all one’s life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

495. “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

496. “I hated that bag, I hated that I knew I would find it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

497. “Well, Judy,” he said, “you really ended up with it all in the end, didn’t you? The career, the money, the apartment, the man. How’d you get so lucky?” JB had grinned.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

498. “But some part of me is always hoping that, if there are others like her, then she will someday see someone she recognizes, someone who feels like home. She has ne er had a friend. I don’t know how deeply she feels loneliness, or even if she has the capacity to recognize it. But my dearest wish is that someone will someday take that loneliness from her, preferably before she’s able to identify the sensation for what it is.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

499. “He takes a breath. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve decided to stay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

500. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

— Hanya Yanagihara