Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

155. “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. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

156. “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

157. “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

158. “Ambition is my only religion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

159. “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

160. “If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing. AMY:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

161. “It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime’s worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

162. “But was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery and fear, and the latter state was all he had needed and wanted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

163. “He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

164. “Sometimes he would think of those moments and feel a sort of disorientation: Was that them, really, those people back then? Where had those people gone? Would they reappear? Or were they now other people entirely? And then he would imagine that those people weren’t so much gone as they were within them, waiting to bob back up to the surface, to reclaim their bodies and minds; they were identities now in remission, but they would always be with them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

165. “I know how you feel, Willem,” Andy had said in one of their secret conversations, “but he doesn’t want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

166. “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

167. “I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protection the most.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

168. “He wished someone would tell him that he was still a full human being despite his feelings; that there was nothing wrong with who he was. Surely there was someone, someone, in the world who felt as he did? Surely his hatred for the act was not a deficiency to be corrected but a simple matter of preference?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

169. “They all – Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors – sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

170. “But then, once you agree, it is necessary that you, the cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don’t want to be here, you can see that the act of existing is depleting for them, and then you have to tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

171. “He stared at me for a long time with that look he had – I know you know the one – where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges being cranked above the moat.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

172. “Maybe it would be nice to confess to someone that most of the time he could barely relate to what was being discussed, that he couldn’t participate in everyone else’s shared language of childhood pratfalls and frustrations. But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

173. “Who would he have been, who would he be, without the scars, the cuts, the hurts, the sores, the fractures, the infections, the splints, and the discharges?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

174. “And now he is once again finding life more and more difficult, each day a little less possible than the last. In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow’s sole prosthetic, and it is from this branch that he hangs. Above.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

178. “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

179. “And still, Willem was his own version of happiness; he was a version of happiness he never thought he’d have.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

180. “He will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and 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

181. “Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

182. “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

183. “For the first time in decades, he isn’t cutting himself at all. If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him. He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

184. “He closes his eyes, not because he’s tired but because it’s a perfect moment, and he knows how to enjoy them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

185. “Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

186. “Try not to try too hard; it’s just a lovely ride.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

187. “We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

188. “A sad thing, when you had to sponge off of your boyfriend in publishing because he made more than you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

189. “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

190. “He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

191. “And yet he was always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of the month: Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month. 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

192. “I had thought to seize the image in my head and preserve it in wax, so that I might always be able to look upon it as one of those rare moments in which one senses the plates of the world shift beneath one and life is forever altered: on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

193. “He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

194. “Finally and essentially: I not only never could have, but never would have, written this book without the conversations with – and the kindness, grace, empathy, forgiveness, and wisdom of – Jared Hohlt, my first and favorite reader, secret keeper, and North Star. His beloved friendship is the greatest gift of my adulthood.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

195. “Dit is mijn wereldje, en ik weet niet wat ik er moet beginnen.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

196. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

197. “You have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you... Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past... The Post-man. Jude the Postman.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

198. “On these days, he succumbed to a sort of enchantment, a state in which his life seemed both unimprovable and, paradoxically, perfectly fixable: Of course Jude wouldn’t get worse. Of course he could be repaired. Of course Willem would be the person to repair him. Of course this was possible; of course this was probable. Days like this seemed to have no nights, and if there were no nights, there was no cutting, there was no sadness, there was nothing to dismay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

199. “Though, of course – if you were here, wouldn’t he still be here as well?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

200. “Harold,” he says, and he hears how awful, how wretched, he sounds, “when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.”

— Hanya Yanagihara