Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

202. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

204. “How often could he really be expected to repeat himself, when with each telling he was stripping the clothes from his skin and the flesh from his bones, until he was as vulnerable as a small pink mouse?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

205. “To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

206. “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

207. “But now, older, he was able to appreciate that they had never even suggested he might owe them a debt – not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

208. “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

209. “He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

210. “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

211. “We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap – if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

213. “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

214. “Sometimes, all he has to do is sit up, and he will be reminded, as if slapped across the face, that his body owns him, not the other way around.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

215. “He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

216. “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

217. “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

218. “And even before I knew what his smile looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

219. “He wasn’t like Harold or Citizen – he was practical; he knew that making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities, but it still troubled him, this forsaking of what he knew to be just.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

220. “The tedium of waking up and realizing that you were a success and that every day you had to keep doing whatever it was that made you a success, because once you stopped, you were no longer a success, you were becoming a failure.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

222. “You will learn to see your life – all of our lives – as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

223. “I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

224. “The person he loved was sick, and would always be sick, and his responsibility was not to make him better but to make him less sick.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

225. “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. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

226. “They were still singing when the doorbell chimed... but as he was standing, Jude put his hand on his wrist, and they remained there, Jude sitting, he standing, until they had sung the last words of the song, and only after they had finished did he go to answer the door. Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he’d found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn’t known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

227. “I think you’re doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm’s dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You’re young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

228. “These things belonged here, in this house: it was as if the house itself had grown them, as if they were something living that would shrivel and die were they moved elsewhere. And then he thought: was the same not true for him? Was he not also something the house had, if not spawned, then nourished and fed? If he left Washington Square, how would he ever know where he truly was in the world? How could he leave these walls that had stared blankly, plainly back at him through all of his states?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

230. “I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life – which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling – was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

231. “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

232. “In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life – all of our lives – as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

233. “How much of who he was was inextricable from what he was unable to do?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

234. “He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

235. “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

236. “Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

237. “It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

238. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

240. “Luke had taught him how to find pleasure in life, and he had removed pleasure absolutely.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

241. “His mother’s house was a familiar land, a place where he would always be revered, where every custom and tradition felt tailored to him and his particular needs.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

242. “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

243. “Whose wheelchair is that?” He looked where Caleb was looking. “Mine,” he said, after a pause. “But why?” Caleb had asked him, looking confused. “You can walk.” He didn’t know what to say. “Sometimes I need it,” he said, finally. “Rarely. I don’t use it that often.” “Good,” said Caleb. “See that you don’t.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

244. “Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

245. “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

246. “Ex Obscuris Lux, From darkness, light.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

247. “Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have nothing to write about.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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