Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

52. “Le cose si rompono, a volte si aggiustano, e ci rendiamo conto che, per quanti danni possiamo subire, la vita ci ricompensa quasi sempre, spesso in modo meraviglioso.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

53. “If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

54. “He was frightened of everything, it sometimes seemed, and he hated that about himself. Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

55. “He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

56. “He will be reminded of how trapped he is, trapped in a body he hates, with a past he hates, and how he will never be able to change either.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

57. “All the most terrifying ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

58. “He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant. Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn’t so bad after all, and felt better.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

59. “Ex Obscuris Lux, From darkness, light.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

60. “On one side is everything he knows, the patterns of his existence as regular and banal as the steady plink of a dripping faucet, where he is alone but safe, and shielded from everything that could hurt him. On the other side are waves, tumult, rainstorms, excitement: everything he cannot control, everything potentially awful and ecstatic, everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of colors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

61. “But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

62. “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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

63. “You know Felix, I never had friends, either, not for a very long time, not until I was much older than you. I wanted them, too. And I always wondered if I would ever find any, and how, and when. And then I went to college, and I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me – everything, really. They made me, make me, into someone better than I really am.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

64. “Harold sighs. “Jude,” he says, “there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

65. “But if you act like you don’t belong, if you act like you’re apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

66. “You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you. You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone. But your life – no matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it has been your fault. Will you remember that?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

67. “Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things... If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

68. “A beautiful proof is succinct, like a beautiful ruling. It combines just a handful of different concepts, albeit from across the mathematical universe, and in a relatively brief series of steps, leads to a grand and new generalized truth in mathematics: that is, a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

69. “With each day he trusted Harold a little more, and at times he wondered if he was making the same mistake again. Was it better to trust or better to be wary? Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

70. “I know my life’s meaningful because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

71. “I was raised Catholic,” he began. “But you’re not now?” the judge asked, frowning. “No,” he said. He had worked for years to keep the apology out of his voice when he said this.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

72. “He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling. 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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

73. “He was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

74. “Willem listening Jude tell a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

75. “Wasn’t it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

76. “Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

77. “It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

78. “And now he is once again finding life more and more difficult, each day a little less possible than the last. In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow’s sole prosthetic, and it is from this branch that he hangs. Above.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

79. “He was unable to conceive of life without him, because Willem had so defined what his life was and could be.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

80. “He was about to speak when Jude put down the water glass he’d been using as a pastry cutter and looked at him. ‘I’m really sorry, Willem,’ he said, so softly that Willem almost couldn’t hear him. He saw Willem looking at his hand and pulled it into his lap. ‘I should never -’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

81. “Be as steely as you want to be, Mr. Irvine had said. Don’t try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

82. “Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he’d found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn’t known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

83. “Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

84. “Jude had smiled at him. “Oh, dying,” he said dismissively. We’re all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t happy years, that it wasn’t a happy life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

85. “Is vriendschap op zich geen wonder, dat je iemand vindt die de grote, eenzame wereld op de een of andere manier minder eenzaam maakt?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

86. “But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives – truly tell their lives – to one person? How often could he really be expected to repeat himself, when with each telling he was stripping the clothes from his skin and the flesh from his bones, until he was as vulnerable as a small pink mouse? He knows, then, that he will never be able to go to another doctor.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

87. “I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all – and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

88. “But was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery and fear, and the latter state was all he had needed and wanted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

89. “Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn’t this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

90. “You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

91. “But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

92. “I should have left him, thought. It was never my place to try to save something that no one else had wanted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

93. “Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

94. “Have you all forgotten? he yearns to ask. Have you forgotten him? Have you forgotten how much I need him? Have you forgotten I don’t know how to be alive without him? Who can teach me? Who can tell me what I should do now?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

95. “Harold,” he says, although Andy is still talking, “release me. Release me from my promise to you. Don’t make me do this anymore. Don’t make me go on.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

96. “He got to see his friends differently, not just as appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; he felt sometimes that he was seeing them for the first time, even after so many years of knowing them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

97. “But she was right about one thing: it did get harder and harder. He did blame himself. And although he tried every day to remember the promise he’d made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he’d read long ago.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

98. “It’s often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most difficult time in their first year – law school, particularly the first year of law school, is not really a place where creativity, abstract thought, and imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think – based on what I’ve heard, not what I know firsthand – that it’s a bit like art school.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

99. “I just think he’s not – ” Happy, he nearly said. But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

100. “It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return. More troubling to him than his.”

— Hanya Yanagihara