Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

268. “He knew Andy thought he was self-destructive, or delusional, or in denial. But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

269. “I know how you feel, Willem,” Andy had said in one of their secret conversations, “but he doesn’t want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

270. “That night, once he was alone, he cried as well: not because of what he had done but because he hadn’t been successful, because he had lived after all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

271. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

273. “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

274. “One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life – its saving, its extension, its return – was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

281. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “Don’t you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?” But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

296. “The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a relationship, and it was awful, and now he will never need to have one again, because he has proven himself incapable of being in one.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

298. “Right and wrong, however, are for – well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

299. “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

300. “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