Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

52. “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

53. “Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

54. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

56. “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

57. “He no longer felt anything for that person, but not feeling anything for that person had been a conscious act of will, like turning away from someone in the street even though you saw them constantly, and pretending you couldn’t see them day after day until one day, you actually couldn’t – or so you could make yourself believe.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

66. “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

67. “When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

68. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

70. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “You don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “Willem listening Jude tell a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

90. “He had wanted to vanish, then, to close his eyes and reel back time, back to before he had ever met Caleb. He would have turned down Rhodes’s invitation; he would have kept living his little life; he would never have known the difference.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

91. “Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction: they decide the length and location of that year’s vacation; they determine if there will be any leftover money, and if so, how it might be spent; they give shape to a day, a week, a year, a life. 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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

96. “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

97. “And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tenderness, of fondness... he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

98. “So basically,” Jude says at last, “basically, you’re saying I’m New Zealand.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

99. “As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

100. “An elegant mind wants elegant endings.”

— Hanya Yanagihara