Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “He felt doped up on sun and food and salt and contentment.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “And so this became his pattern: he knew the law. He had a feeling for it. But then, just when I wanted him to stop talking, he would introduce a moral argument, he would mention ethics. Please, I would think, please don’t do this. The law is simple. It allows for less nuance than you’d imagine. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law – although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. I.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “Sing me something that tells me something about you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

171. “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

172. “New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common... Only here did you feel compelled to somehow justify anything short of rabidity for your career; only here did you have to apologize for having faith in something other than yourself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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. “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

191. “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

192. “He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories;.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

193. “But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

199. “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

200. “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