Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “I guess I just don’t think that sort of thing is for someone like me.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

352. “What point?” Malcolm had asked. “That you can be as annoying to white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

353. “Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

354. “And yet somehow in the past seven months he had decided that he was going to repair Jude, that he was going to fix him, when really, he didn’t need fixing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

355. “He finds himself replaying old conversations he has had or overheard with people talking about their relationships, trying to gauge the normalcy of his against theirs, looking for clues about how he should conduct himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

356. “It is still an unfamiliar feeling to have so much space, and a stranger one to be able to afford it. But you can, he has to remind himself sometimes...”

— Hanya Yanagihara

357. “But loneliness has a compass of its own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

358. “Ever since their relationship has changed from what it had been into what it now is, their conversations have become both more intimate and more mundance, and that final weekend is always a perfect, condensed reflection of that: 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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

360. “Here, his life suspends itself; here, he might be anyone, anywhere. He can stay as late as he likes. No one is waiting for him, no one will be disappointed if he doesn’t call, no one will be angry if he doesn’t go home.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

361. “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

362. “After years – decades, almost – of these parties, the two of them had worked out their own sign language, a pantomime whose every gesture meant the same thing – save me – albeit with varying levels of intensity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

363. “Well, Judy,” he said, “you really ended up with it all in the end, didn’t you? The career, the money, the apartment, the man. How’d you get so lucky?” JB had grinned.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

364. “But some part of me is always hoping that, if there are others like her, then she will someday see someone she recognizes, someone who feels like home. She has ne er had a friend. I don’t know how deeply she feels loneliness, or even if she has the capacity to recognize it. But my dearest wish is that someone will someday take that loneliness from her, preferably before she’s able to identify the sensation for what it is.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

365. “In those months I thought often of what I was trying to do, of how hard it is to keep alive someone who doesn’t want to stay alive.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

366. “He takes a breath. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve decided to stay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

367. “I know my life’s meaningful because” – and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued – ” because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

368. “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

369. “It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

370. “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

371. “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

372. “That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

373. “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

374. “What he wouldn’t know until he was much older, was that no one was ever free. That to know someone and to love them was assuming the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

375. “The truth was that I didn’t really feel the need for it; I had never envisioned having a child, I didn’t feel about them one way or another. And that seemed enough of a reason not to: having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

376. “The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they’d told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude’s father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

377. “By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

378. “Their participation in these parties were a kind of theater that the four of them agreed to stage for themselves, but once one of the actors left the stage, there seemed little point in continuing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

379. “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

380. “He had always felt bound to Willem by the big things – love; trust – but he likes being bound to him by the small things as well: bills and taxes and dental checkups.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

381. “He always forgot; he was always made to remember.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

382. “He knew what the houses meant to Malcolm: they were an assertion of control, a reminder that for all the uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate perfectly, that would always express what he was unable to in words.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

383. “I hated that bag, I hated that I knew I would find it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

384. “The easiest explanations are often the right ones,” his math professor, Dr. Li, always said, and maybe the sam principle applied here. Except he knew it didn’t. Math was one thing. Nothing else was that reductive.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

385. “This was what you did for people you loved: you gave them their freedom.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

386. “The point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure he will bring you, whatever form it comes in – and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

387. “He knew that making a career as a lawyer meant, sacrifices, either of money, or of moralities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

388. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

389. “It was the worst – the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating – writing experience I’d had... I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I’d somehow become possessed by it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

390. “And so this became his pattern: he knew the law. He had a feeling for it. But then, just when I wanted him to stop talking, he would introduce a moral argument, he would mention ethics. Please, I would think, please don’t do this. The law is simple. It allows for less nuance than you’d imagine. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law – although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. I.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

391. “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

392. “And although he hadn’t fretted over whether his life was worthwhile, he had always wondered why he, why so many others, went on living at all; it had been difficult to convince himself at times, and yet so many people, so many millions, billions of people, lived in misery he couldn’t fathom, with deprivations and illnesses that were obscene in their extremity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

393. “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

394. “This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

395. “Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

396. “And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don’t often do well in law school, but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

397. “Around her he had felt none of the constant anxiety, nor watchfulness, that he seemed condemned to feel around everyone else; the vigilance was exhausting, but it eventually became simply a part of life, a habit like good posture.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

398. “In the mornings I could not remember the specifics, only that he was in them and that I was happy, and that the days that followed often felt unbearably dreary and sad, a landscape bled of contentment, and I began to think of them as something to be withstood before I could return to the cosseting blank darkness of night.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

399. “I love you,” he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

400. “He would have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp that was really more of a glide and to have the face and body that he did.”

— Hanya Yanagihara