Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “It was as if his despair had given rise to a sense of invincibility; he felt that everything extraneous and soft had been burned off of him and he was left as an exposed steel core, indestructible and yet pliant, able to withstand anything.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “There were flowers everywhere – winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their sweet, faintly fecal fragrance –.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

259. “If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing. AMY:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

260. “And yet he was always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of the month: Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month. He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

261. “It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was – but the one he dreamed of being.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

262. “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

263. “He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

264. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “But here’s what no one says – when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come. Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

270. “No one was there, he realized. The room was his. He felt the creature inside him – which he pictured as slight and raggedy and lemurlike, quick-reflexed and ready to sprint, its dark wet eyes forever scanning the landscape for future dangers – relax and sag to the ground.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

271. “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

272. “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

273. “De wet is simpel. Ze biedt ruimte voor minder nuances dan je zou denken. Ethiek en moraal hebben weliswaar een plaats in het recht, maar niet in de jurisprudentie. De moraal helpt ons om wetten te maken, maar de moraal helpt ons niet ze toe te passen. p. 183.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

274. “He was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

275. “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

276. “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

277. “He was terrifically disciplined – he was in everything – and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to abandon.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

278. “These days, maybe you’d smoke some pot. Maybe, every once in a while, if you were feeling very ironic, you might do a line of coke. But that was it. This was an age of discipline, of deprivation, not inspiration, and at any rate inspiration no longer meant drugs.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

279. “He snapped on the light next to his side of the bed and tried to read, but all he could see was the razor, and all he could feel was his arms tingling with need, as if he had not veins but circuitry, fizzing and blipping with electricity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

280. “He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

281. “He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it- and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

282. “And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades – his life – searching bumblingly for a way out that didn’t exist, had never existed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

283. “New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

284. “I always had the sense, during these exchanges, that although there might not be a single correct answer, there was in fact a single incorrect one, after which he would never say anything again, and I was forever trying to calculate what that answer might be so I would never say it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

285. “Willem had always been careful not to express too much interest in exploring the many cupboarded cabinet in which Jude had secreted himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

286. “He was tired, he was in pain, but it didn’t matter; his tiredness felt like something sweet and warm, his pain was familiar and expected, and in those moments he was aware that he was capable of joyfulness, that life was honeyed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

287. “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

288. “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

289. “It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

290. “And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyday. For a brief period – briefer and briefer with each week – the world was splendid and unknown.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

291. “But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

292. “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

293. “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

294. “It’s funny – of all the things I was scared of, I was never scared of the dark. In the dark, everyone was helpless, and, knowing that, that I was just like everyone else, no less, made me feel braver.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

295. “He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

296. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

297. “You have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you... Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past... The Post-man. Jude the Postman.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

298. “People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive, a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph to the upper right.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

299. “I was so busy building my life only to wake and discover it was over.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

300. “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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara