Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “When I looked at him, I understood, for the first time since Jacob died, what people meant when they said someone was heartbreaking, that something could break your heart.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

59. “They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. And.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

60. “Soms was de druk om gelukkig te worden bijna benauwend, alsof gelukkig zijn iets was wat iedereen moest en kon bereiken en elk compromis op dat gebied je eigen schuld was.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

61. “Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace. But.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

62. “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

63. “An elegant mind wants elegant endings.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

64. “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

65. “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

66. “He always had the impression, when waving goodbye to Felix at the end of the afternoon – Felix listlessly raising his own hand before slouching back into the recesses of the entryway – that he never left the house, never went out, never had friends over. Poor Felix: his very name was a taunt.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

70. “He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him – he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

72. “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” –.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

73. “But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives – truly tell their lives – to one person?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

79. “He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler’s perfect knife edge.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

80. “But really, he would know: it was when he walked into the greenhouse that afternoon. It was when he allowed himself to be escorted in, when he gave up everything to follow Brother Luke. That had been the moment. And after that, it had never been right again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one’s colleagues.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

85. “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

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. “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

88. “What does Malcolm have to worry about?” JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

89. “The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

90. “Wasn’t it a miracle to be adopted at thirty, to find people who loved you so much that they wanted to call you their own? 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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “He knew this was childish, but all stubborn acts are childish acts. Here, stubbornness was his only weapon. Patience; stubbornness; love: he had to believe these would be enough. He had to believe that they would be stronger than any habit of Jude’s, no matter how long or diligently practiced.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

94. “But what is he willing to do to feel less alone? Could he destroy everything he’s built and protected so diligently for intimacy? How much humiliation is he ready to endure? He doesn’t know; he is afraid of discovering the answer.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

95. “He feels about Caleb the way he once felt about Brother Luke: someone in whom he had, rashly, entrusted himself, someone in whom he had placed such hopes, someone he hoped could save him. But even when it became clear that they would not, even when his hopes turned rancid, he was unable to disentangle himself from them, he was unable to leave.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

96. “Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcom’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

97. “To live a life in color, a life in love: Was that not every person’s dream?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

98. “Now he looked at couples – in restaurants, on the street, at parties – and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

99. “He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

100. “And then he is in bed, light-headed but not quite sleepy, staring at the dark, mercury-like gleam the chandelier makes in the shadowy room. “I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.”

— Hanya Yanagihara