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. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

254. “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

255. “Sometimes he would think of those moments and feel a sort of disorientation: Was that them, really, those people back then? Where had those people gone? Would they reappear? Or were they now other people entirely? And then he would imagine that those people weren’t so much gone as they were within them, waiting to bob back up to the surface, to reclaim their bodies and minds; they were identities now in remission, but they would always be with them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

256. “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

257. “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

258. “Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.”

— 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. “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

261. “He had been waiting for some sort of punishment for his arrogance, for thinking he could have what everyone else has, and here-at last- it was. This is what you get, said the voice inside his head. This is what you get for pretending to be someone you know you’re not for thinking you’re as good as other people.”

— 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. “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

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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? But then, a sole option was no option at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

278. “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

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. “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

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 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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

290. “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

291. “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

292. “Who would he have been, who would he be, without the scars, the cuts, the hurts, the sores, the fractures, the infections, the splints, and the discharges?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

293. “He was fatherless, and he knew that fatherless children mourned the absence in their lives.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

296. “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

297. “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. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

298. “He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

299. “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

300. “You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.”

— Hanya Yanagihara