Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “You don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

253. “There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

254. “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

255. “All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

256. “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

257. “Don’t let this silence become a habit,” she’d warned him shortly before she died.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

258. “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

259. “It is wonderful, and rare, being out of the city, being back at their house, and the four of them enjoy one another’s company. He even feels well enough to give Andy an abbreviated tour of the property, which Andy has visited only in springtime or summer, but which is different in autumn: raw, sad, lovely, the barn’s roof plastered with fallen yellow gingko leaves that make it look as if it’s been laid with sheets of gold leaf.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

260. “That Saturday evening, they had watched a movie together, and at one point Harold and Julia had begun talking about the Truro house’s kitchen renovation. He half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull he couldn’t follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

261. “When Jacob was a baby, I would find myself feeling more assured with each month he lived, as if the longer he stayed in this world, the more deeply he would become anchored to it, as if by being alive, he was staking claim to life itself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “You’re going to make friends, Felix,” he says, finally. “You will. You won’t have to work as hard at finding them as you will at keeping them, but I promise, it’ll be work worth doing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

266. “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

267. “But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real. In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

268. “Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

269. “But I had never before been to a classmate’s house where there was no mother. You didn’t expect to see a father – they were creatures who materialized only at dinnertime, never in the afternoon – but the mothers were always there, a presence as reliable as a couch or a table.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

270. “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

271. “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

272. “These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from ‘Frog and Toad,’ and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB’s studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts – a second heart, a second brain – to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

273. “He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was – terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing – he felt with Caleb.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

274. “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

275. “Enough,” she said, “to convince me that there’s a hell and those men need to be in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

276. “When Jacob was a baby, I would find myself feeling more assured with each month he lived, as if the longer he stayed in this world, the more deeply he would become anchored to it, as if by being alive, he was staking claim to life itself. It was a preposterous notion, of course, and it was proven wrong in the most horrible way. But I couldn’t stop thinking this: that life tethered life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

277. “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

278. “He sensed that JB – who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well – was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

279. “In graduate school, he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors are the most boring people. A string sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. “If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,” his teacher had said.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

280. “Over their early dinner, he tried to thank Harold again, but every time he tried, Harold stopped him with increasing impatience. “Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?” he finally asked.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

281. “The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that 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, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

283. “But this was part of the deal when you were friends with Jude: he knew it, Andy knew it, they all knew it. You let things slide that your instincts told you not to, you scooted around the edges of your suspicions. 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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

285. “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

286. “JB’s ambition was fueled by a lust for that future, for his speedy arrival to it; Jude’s, he thought, was motivated more by a fear that if he didn’t move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left...”

— Hanya Yanagihara

287. “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

288. “How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

289. “He knows his telling other people about the adoption is a form of bragging, and that bragging has its own consequences, but he cannot help himself. Just this once, he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior. Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

290. “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

291. “But time, I have come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs. We speak of managing time, but it is the opposite. Our lives are filled with businesses because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

292. “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

293. “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

294. “And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

295. “Oh god, he thought, oh god. But it was as if his mind was a bit of machinery caught uselessly in a groove, and he couldn’t think beyond those two words. It was too bright in the waiting room, and he tried to relax, but he couldn’t for the phrase beating its rhythm like a heartbeat, thudding through his body like a second pulse: Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

296. “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

297. “Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

298. “If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

299. “Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

300. “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