Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

109. “Ambition is my only religion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

110. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

117. “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

118. “Here, time was his, and space was his, and every door could be shut, every window locked. He would stand before the tiny hallway closet – an alcove, really, over which they had strung a length of burlap – and admire the stores within it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

119. “She knew that he wore his life on his skin, that his biography was written in his flesh, and on his bones.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “He will no longer be able to pretend that he isn’t disabled. Up, once more, will go his freak-show factor. He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “He regretted his offer the instant he made it, for the truth was that Jude was his favorite of the three of them to paint: He was the most beautiful of them, with the most interesting face and the most unusual coloring, and he was the shyest, and so pictures of him always felt more precious than ones of the others.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

131. “Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

132. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

134. “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

135. “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

136. “He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

137. “I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he sacrificed it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

139. “The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

140. “And he’d eat his breakfast and leave for the day, stepping out into the world in which no one knew him, and in which he could be anyone.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “All those hours, all those hours he has spent cutting, and hiding the cutting, and beating back his memories, what would he do instead with all those hours? He would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving one.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

145. “He was never able to explain what the cutting did for him in a way he’d understand: how it was a form of punishment and also of cleansing, how if allowed him to drain everything toxic and spoiled from himself, how it kept him from being irrationally angry at others, at everyone, how it kept him from shouting, from violence, how it made him feel like his body, his life, was truly his and no one else’s.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

146. “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

147. “I am guilty of many things when it comes to him. But sometimes, illogically, I feel guiltiest for this. I opened the van door, I invited him inside. And while I didn’t drive off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

148. “It’s not so much that Adele was a mother to me, it’s that to me, a mother was Adele.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

149. “But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara