Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. 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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Willem listening Jude tell a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

77. “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

78. “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

79. “As you get 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, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing... He was, he knew, a simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the most complicated of people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— 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. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

84. “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

85. “I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protection the most.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

86. “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

87. “I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

88. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

91. “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

92. “You have to tell someone,” Ana used to say, and as he had grown older, he had decided to interpret this sentence literally: Some One. Someday, he thought, somehow, he would find a way to tell some one, one person. And then he had, someone he had trusted, and that person had died, and he didn’t have the fortitude to tell his story ever again. But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives – truly tell their lives – to one person?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

93. “An elegant mind wants elegant endings.”

— 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. “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

96. “He half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull that he couldn’t follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

97. “I knew I would have to start all over. I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. And that was the worst thing, the most reprehensible thing. He had decided to believe Caleb, to believe him over us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought and always been taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

98. “And, Mr. St. Francis, what happens when we forsake morals in law for social governance? What is the point at which a country, and its people, should start valuing social control over its sense of morality? Is there such a point? I’m not convinced there is.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

99. “Take me somewhere, he hears a voice inside him say, but he doesn’t know to whom he is saying this, or where he wants to go.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

100. “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