Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “So basically,” Jude says at last, “basically, you’re saying I’m New Zealand.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

108. “It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

109. “An elegant mind wants elegant endings.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

110. “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

111. “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

112. “He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

113. “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

114. “He will be reminded that he is a nothing, a scooped-out husk in which the fruit has long since mummified and shrunk, and now rattles uselessly. He will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and his most wretched moments, the one that asks him who he thinks he is to inconvenience so many people, to think he has the right to keep going when even his own body tells him he should stop.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

115. “But he understood, primally almost, the concept of losing, of loosing oneself from the world, of disappearing into a different place, one of retreat and safety, of the twinned yearnings of escape and discovery.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “Success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing – success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

121. “He had known, ever since the hospital, that it was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others: that, to him, was always the most compelling argument.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

122. “He has always known that if he wanted to be with someone, he would have to make an exchange. And Caleb, he knows, is the best he will ever be able to find.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

123. “But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

124. “Sometimes I felt that there was something physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

125. “You’re going to make friends, Felix,” he says, finally. “You will. You won’t have to work as hard at finding them as you will at keeping them, but I promise, it’ll be work worth doing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

126. “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

127. “Everything he has learned tells him to leave; Everything he has wished for tells him to stay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

128. “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

129. “There had been periods in his twenties when he would look at his friends and feel such a pure, deep contentment that he would wish the world around them would simply cease, that none of them would have to move from that moment, when everything was in equilibrium and his affection for them was perfect. But, of course, that was never to be: a beat later, and everything shifted, and the moment quietly vanished.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

130. “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

131. “Ambition is my only religion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

132. “My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this, and he will keep repeating the words to himself – part chant, part curse, part reassurance – as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

133. “But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

134. “Much of his friendship with Jude, it often seemed, was not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

135. “I had the strange sense that I was looking inside a diorama, at a scene of happiness I could witness but never enter.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

136. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

138. “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

139. “Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

140. “But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face – I still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you, and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

141. “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

142. “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

143. “Don’t let this silence become a habit,” she’d warned him shortly before she died.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

144. “Although often he feels he isn’t so much living as he is merely existing, being moved through his days rather than moving through them himself. But he doesn’t punish himself too much for this; merely existing is difficult enough.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

145. “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

146. “To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words! – it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

147. “Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

148. “Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

149. “Amicizia: era un qualcosa che troppo spesso sfidava la logica, eludendo le persone meritevoli per premiare quelle eccentriche, complicate, guaste.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

150. “You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry – they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara