Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “Remember, good years followed the bad. But he can’t do it again; he can’t live once more through those fifteen years, those fifteen years whose half-life have been so long and so resonant, that have determined everything he has become and done.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

165. “Flora had not seemed to mind the excessive amount of time their parents demanded from them, which had meant that he could spend more time in his room working on his model houses and less time downstairs in the den, fidgeting through one of his father’s interminable Ozu film festivals.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

166. “People so entitled, so certain they won’t be caught that being caught – that very concern – doesn’t even occur to them. People who think the laws are written for people who make less than nine figures a year. People who think the laws are applicable only by race, or by tax bracket.” He.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

167. “What’s the movie called? he imagined Willem asking, imagined Willem smiling. Dear Comrade, he told Willem, because that was how Willem and he had sometimes addressed their e-mails to each other.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

168. “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

169. “He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

170. “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

171. “He would be hurt again and again – everyone was – but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “One thing I’ve learned,” she said, “you have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them. I’m going to teach you how to talk about them, because it’s going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame. You’ll be wrong, of course, but you’ll always think it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

178. “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

179. “To live a life in color, a life in love: Was that not every person’s dream?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

180. “He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

181. “But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself – his very life – has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

182. “It’s such a beautiful house,” I said, as I always did, and as I always did, I hoped he was hearing me say that I was proud of him: for the house he built, and for the life he had built within it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

186. “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

187. “Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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. “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

195. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

197. “But the scars were difficult for him to see not because they were aesthetically offensive, but because each one was evidence of something withstood or inflicted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

198. “He was astonished but relieved by how easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

199. “He saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

200. “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