Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

305. “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

306. “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

307. “And if he was to be honest, he was also flattered by JB’s jealousy: to JB, he wasn’t a cripple who was being cosmically repaid for a lousy run; he was JB’s equal, someone in whom JB saw only the things to envy and never the things to pity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

308. “Maar wat was geluk anders dan een uitspatting, een onmogelijk vol te houden toestand, deels omdat die zo moeilijk te verwoorden was?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

309. “Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “Even now, he has a horror of repulsing, by being unkempt, or dirty, or unsightly. “You’ll always be ugly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be neat,” Father Gabriel used to tell him, and although Father Gabriel was wrong about many things, he knows he was right about this.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

316. “Jura ist simpel. Sie hat weniger Nuancen, als man denkt. Ja, Ethik und Moral haben einen Platz in der Rechtswissenschaft – aber nicht in der Rechtsprechung. Die Moral hilft uns dabei, die Gesetze zu formulieren, aber sie hilft uns nicht dabei, sie anzuwenden.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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