Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face – I still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you, and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

302. “In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

303. “I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life-food, shelter, weaponry-being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

304. “He would be hurt again and again – everyone was – but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

306. “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

307. “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

308. “All you really have to do is be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

309. “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

310. “Now he hoped to be someone adrift, a presence so thin and light and insubstantial that he seemed to displace no air at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

311. “Although often he feels he isn’t so much living as he is merely existing, being moved through his days rather than moving through them himself. But he doesn’t punish himself too much for this; merely existing is difficult enough.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

312. “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

313. “At five thirty, the light was perfect: buttery and dense and fat somehow, swelling the room as it had the train into something expansive and hopeful.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

314. “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

315. “People make it sound so easy, as if the decision to want it is the most difficult part of the process. But he knows better: being in a relationship would mean exposing himself to someone, which he has still never done to anyone but Andy; it would mean the confrontation of his own body, which he has not seen unclothed in at least a decade – even in the shower he doesn’t look at himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

316. “He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

317. “He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be; even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he would become.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

319. “But there is a moment before they begin heading uphill and Jude begins walking toward them in which they all hold their positions, and it reminds him of a set, in which every scene can be redone, every mistake can be corrected, every sorrow reshot. And in that moment, they are on one edge of the frame, and Jude is on the other, but they are all smiling at one another, and the world seems to hold nothing but sweetness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

320. “Though they never disappeared completely, of course. But they were at least more distant – they weren’t things that followed you, wraithlike, tugging at you for attention, jumping in front of you when you ignored them, demanding so much of your time and effort that it became impossible to think of anything else.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

321. “He was using himself to save himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

322. “He had asked for responsibility without understanding completely how much damage he could do.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

323. “He felt doped up on sun and food and salt and contentment.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

324. “There is one drawing of him that is very small, on a postcard-size piece of paper, and when he examines it more closely, he sees that something had been written on it, and then erased: ‘Dear Jude,’ he makes out, ‘please’ – but there is nothing more after that word.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

325. “Part of him realizes, he had always thought it would be better as an adult, as if somehow the mere fact of age would transform the experience into something glorious and enjoyable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

326. “I admired how rapidly, how fluidly, she was adjusting to the fact that the child she thought she would have was not the child she did have.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

327. “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

328. “He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday – cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold – and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

329. “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

330. “And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

331. “His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling – as he often did – as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

332. “That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself – after you, after me, after all of who loved him – makes me think that my life has been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

333. “What about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he knew enough by then – he was a fast learner – to simply shrug and say, with a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” 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

334. “It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

335. “And then they were gone, in a last round of embraces and goodbyes that included David in gesture if not in warmth or spirit.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

336. “The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us – when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

337. “The messages were brief, and unrevealing, but he played them over and over, weeping, bent double with grief, the messages’ very banality – “Hey, Judy. I’m going to the farmers’ market to pick up those ramps. But do you want anything else? Let me know” – something precious, because it was proof of their life together.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

338. “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, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

339. “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

340. “At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

341. “He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

342. “He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and harder it was to find your way back.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

343. “At his age, the only truly important aspects of one’s identity were sexual prowess; professional accomplishments; and money.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

344. “In those years, fear – of sounding dumb, of being inadequate – kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

345. “Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

346. “It was a time he rarely thought about, his flight to Philadelphia, because it was a period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; there had been times in those weeks when he had opened his eyes and was genuinely unable to discern whether what had just happened had actually happened, or whether he had imagined it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

347. “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

348. “His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

349. “Normally at parties he grabbed or was grabbed by a group of people, and spent the night as the nuclei for a variety of three- or foursomes, bounding from one to the next, gathering the gossip, starting harmless rumors, pretending to share confidences, getting others to tell him who they hated by divulging hatreds of his own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

350. “His father, he knew, had gotten into some sort of trouble in Stockholm – he was never to know what – that had in part encouraged his parents’ move to the States. They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.”

— Hanya Yanagihara