Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “He will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and most wretched moments, the one that asks him who he thinks he is to inconvenience so many people, to think he has the right to keep going when even his own body tells him he should stop.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

302. “There is a point – for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago – when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

303. “Sometimes he found himself resenting the others’ definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

304. “It seemed the worst kind of selfishness, the worst kind of self-indulgence, to disavow what he knew was right simply because he was frightened, because he was scared of being uncomfortable and miserable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

305. “He was a bite of an apple, but Edward Bishop was that apple baked into a pie with a shattery, lardy crust pattered with sugar, and after a taste of that, there was no going back to the other.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

307. “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

308. “This isn’t fair, he would think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

309. “It will soon be a new year,” his grandfather said into this silence, “and new years are always more revealing than old ones. You will make your decision, and it will be yes or no, and the years will keep ending and beginning and ending and beginning, whatever you choose.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

310. “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

311. “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

312. “You’re not just my weird patient, Jude”, Andy said. “You’re also my weird friend.” He paused. “Or at least, I hope you are.” He smiled into the phone. “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m honored to be your weird friend.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

313. “Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

314. “He wished someone would tell him that he was still a full human being despite his feelings; that there was nothing wrong with who he was. Surely there was someone, someone, in the world who felt as he did? Surely his hatred for the act was not a deficiency to be corrected but a simple matter of preference?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

315. “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

316. “You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

317. “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

318. “He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

319. “He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn’t want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he’s found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he’s sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects – hammers; wrenches; pliers – he’s embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

320. “Finally and essentially: I not only never could have, but never would have, written this book without the conversations with – and the kindness, grace, empathy, forgiveness, and wisdom of – Jared Hohlt, my first and favorite reader, secret keeper, and North Star. His beloved friendship is the greatest gift of my adulthood.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

321. “He was, he knew, a simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the most complicated of people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

322. “And then Willem said various kind and unbelievable things about his body, which he chose to ignore, because he knew they weren’t true.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

323. “There was a period – or at least you hoped there was – with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

324. “And still, Willem was his own version of happiness; he was a version of happiness he never thought he’d have.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

325. “But he has overseen their house himself, and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says, “I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

326. “Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

327. “And sometimes it was neither day nor night but somewhere in between, and there would be something strange and dusty about the light that made him imagine for a moment that there might after all be such a thing as heaven, and that he might after all have made it there. And then he would hear Ana’s voice, and remember again why he was there, and want to close his eyes all over again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

328. “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

329. “But getting frustrated with your paintings – and it was impossible not to think of your work as your colleague and co-participant, as if it was something that sometimes decided to be agreeable and collaborate with you, and sometimes decided to be truculent and unyielding, like a grouchy toddler – was just what happened. You had to just keep doing it, and doing it, and one day, you’d get it right.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvellous years were not behind them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

339. “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

340. “And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?” – as all around him, the apartment filled with light.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

348. “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

349. “He has just come home, so exhausted that he feels soluble, as if he is evaporating into the air, so insubstantial that he feels not made of blood and bone but of vapor and fog, when he sees Willem standing before him. He opens his mouth to speak to him, but then he blinks and Willem is gone, and he is teetering, his arms stretched before him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

350. “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