Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Now he drops his mouth open. Now he hops in a little circle. Now he drags his leg behind him. His moans fill the air in the quiet, still house.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

104. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

106. “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

107. “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

108. “I love you,” said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

109. “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

110. “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

111. “My phone rang, and although it wasn’t a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

113. “It was like any relationship, he felt – it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn’t it wither?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

114. “You spent so much time explaining yourself, your work, to others that it was a relief to simply be with another person to whom you didn’t have to explain anything.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies – you know, those little white ones – I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield. And.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

122. “It seemed the worst kind of selfishness, the worst kind of self-indulgence, to disavow what he knew was right simply because he was frightened, because he was scared of being uncomfortable and miserable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

123. “He has been lucky beyond measure; he has an adulthood that people dream about: Why, then, does he insist on revisiting and replaying events that happened so long ago? Why can he not simply take pleasure in his present? Why must he so honor his past? Why does it become more vivid, not less, the further he moves from it?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

124. “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

125. “However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

126. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

128. “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

129. “It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was – but the one he dreamed of being.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

130. “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

131. “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

132. “Harold,” he says, although Andy is still talking, “release me. Release me from my promise to you. Don’t make me do this anymore. Don’t make me go on.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

133. “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

134. “The best part about going away is coming home.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

135. “There were flowers everywhere – winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their sweet, faintly fecal fragrance –.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

136. “Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

137. “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

138. “Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone. So he would stand here for another moment, the bag leaden in his hand, and then he would take a breath, and then he would make his first step: his first step to a new life; his first step – to paradise.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

139. “Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of loneliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, that there is something strange and unacceptable about the life he has. Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him to want, never occurred to him he might have:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

140. “He was fatherless, and he knew that fatherless children mourned the absence in their lives.”

— 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. “You’re a brilliant man, and you’ll be brilliant, and you’ll be rewarded for your brilliance. 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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

144. “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

145. “I felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

146. “Jude, do you ever want to be with someone?” “I never thought I would.” “But that’s not what I asked.” “I don’t know, Willem,” he says, unable to look at Willem’s face. “I guess I just don’t think that sort of thing is for someone like me.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

147. “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

148. “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

149. “He didn’t really care if they felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without aching for them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

150. “The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is rarely true.”

— Hanya Yanagihara