Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “To live a life in color, a life in love: Was that not every person’s dream?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

223. “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

224. “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

225. “But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, of perpetual doubt. Or it is to some people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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 unnacceptable about the life he has.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

230. “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

231. “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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

232. “Sometimes he was hit hard enough so that he lost consciousness, which is what he began to crave: that blackness, where time passed and he wasn’t in it, where things were done to him but he didn’t know.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

233. “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

234. “He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “Now was not the time to get ensnared in something new and complicated, and he didn’t really have the energy for a one-night hookup which, he knew, had a funny way of becoming as exhausting as something longer-term.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

241. “He feels his past is a cancer, one he should have treated long ago but instead ignored. And now Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor have metastasized, now they are too large and too overwhelming for him to eliminate.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

243. “The point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure he will bring you, whatever form it comes in – and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

245. “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

246. “Instead here he was hiding in the bathroom, making busywork for himself as a few yards away, one of his dearest friends sat alone on a disgusting sofa, making the slow, sad journey back to consciousness, back to the land of the living, without anyone at all by his side.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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