Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right and wrong, however, are for – well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

152. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

157. “In those years, fear – of sounding dumb, of being inadequate – kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

158. “Ambition is my only religion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

166. “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

167. “His dark eyes had turned that same unnamable gray that only the very young or the very old possess: the color of the sea from which one comes, the color of the sea to which one returns.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

168. “But Jude was always there. He had never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and he had always spent the night in their room, his presence beneath Willem’s bunk as familiar and constant as the sea.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

169. “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

170. “I have never been one of those people – I know you aren’t, either – who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

171. “And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don’t often do well in law school, but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

172. “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

173. “We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia;.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

178. “Though they never disappeared completely, of course. But they were at least more distant – they weren’t things that followed you, wraithlike, tugging at you for attention, jumping in front of you when you ignored them, demanding so much of your time and effort that it became impossible to think of anything else.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

179. “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

180. “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

181. “I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted – how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

182. “I know my life’s meaningful because” – and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued – ” because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

183. “But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

184. “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

185. “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

186. “But he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

187. “He found himself keeping mental lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask anyone for the answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely was not prepared to have.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

188. “I didn’t like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

189. “But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

190. “And if we are being philosophical – which we today are – we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

191. “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

192. “But mostly, I missed watching you two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly, sincerely affectionate you were with him; missed watching you listen to each other, the way you both did so intently.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

193. “Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

194. “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

195. “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

196. “Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

197. “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

198. “He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence – the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts – could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties’ limits were understood and respected.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

199. “How might things have been different if he spoke only one sentence? And that sentence could have been “Jude, are you trying to kill yourself?” or “Jude, you need to tell me what’s going on,” or “Jude, why do you do this to yourself?” Any of those would have been acceptable; any of those would have led to a larger conversation that would have been reparative, or at the very least preventative.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

200. “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