Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

206. “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

207. “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

208. “You understood that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

209. “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

210. “I’m not mad at you, Jude,” he said. “And I know you’re trying. I just wish you didn’t have to try; I wish this weren’t something you had to fight against so hard.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

211. “In those months I thought often of what I was trying to do, of how hard it is to keep alive someone who doesn’t want to stay alive.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

215. “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

216. “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

217. “This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

218. “Jura ist simpel. Sie hat weniger Nuancen, als man denkt. Ja, Ethik und Moral haben einen Platz in der Rechtswissenschaft – aber nicht in der Rechtsprechung. Die Moral hilft uns dabei, die Gesetze zu formulieren, aber sie hilft uns nicht dabei, sie anzuwenden.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

220. “How fast, how distressingly fast, had their instinct for fear been reawakened, the fear itself a virus that lay dormant but that they would never be able to permanently dispel. Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

221. “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

222. “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

223. “The question was how you ignored someone’s request to be left alone – even if it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won’t be helped while realizing that if you don’t try to help, then you’re not being a friend at all?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

224. “Years ago, after the publication of my third book, a journalist once asked me if you could tell right away whether a student had a mind for law or not, and the answer is: Sometimes. But often, you’re wrong – the student who seemed so bright in the first half of the semester becomes steadily less so as the year goes on, and the student about whom you never thought one thing or another is the one who emerges as a dazzler, someone you love hearing think.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “Either way, being single at forty is different from being single at thirty, and with every year it becomes less understandable, less enviable, and more pathetic, more inappropriate.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

229. “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

230. “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

231. “Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

232. “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

233. “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

234. “But they’re your parents,” Malcolm said to him once a year or so. “You can’t just stop talking to them.” But you could, you did: he was proof of that. 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

235. “What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures? And.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

236. “If he sacrifices his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won; he will be surrendering to him, to that night in the field with the.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “To be a scientist is to learn to live all one’s life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

244. “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

245. “The restaurant was filled with businessmen, the kinds of people who telegraphed their wealth and power with the cut of their suits and the subtlety of their watches: you had to be wealthy and powerful yourself in order to understand what was being communicated. To everyone else, they were men in gray suits, indistinguishable from one another.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

246. “He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

247. “Maar wat was geluk anders dan een uitspatting, een onmogelijk vol te houden toestand, deels omdat die zo moeilijk te verwoorden was?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

248. “Sometimes he looks at his arms and is filled with a self-hatred so fiery that he can barely breathe: much of what his body has become has been beyond his control, but his arms have been all his doing, and he can only blame himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

250. “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