Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

352. “I always had the sense, during these exchanges, that although there might not be a single correct answer, there was in fact a single incorrect one, after which he would never say anything again, and I was forever trying to calculate what that answer might be so I would never say it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

353. “Willem had always been careful not to express too much interest in exploring the many cupboarded cabinet in which Jude had secreted himself.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

354. “I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

355. “It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

356. “And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyday. For a brief period – briefer and briefer with each week – the world was splendid and unknown.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

357. “But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

358. “In graduate school, he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors are the most boring people. A string sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. “If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,” his teacher had said.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

359. “If you love home- and even if you don’t- there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

360. “He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it- and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

361. “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

362. “He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

363. “But I had never before been to a classmate’s house where there was no mother. You didn’t expect to see a father – they were creatures who materialized only at dinnertime, never in the afternoon – but the mothers were always there, a presence as reliable as a couch or a table.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

364. “You have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you... Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past... The Post-man. Jude the Postman.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

365. “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

366. “I was so busy building my life only to wake and discover it was over.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

367. “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.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

368. “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

369. “Science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery. Language could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, its rules imposed or ignored at whim. There was no discipline to it. It seemed sometimes a sort of game made up by man to amuse himself with.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

370. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

375. “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

376. “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

377. “Data, investigation, analysis, news, rumor: A dystopia flattens those terms into one. There is what the state says, and then there is everything else, and that everything else falls into one category: information.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

378. “For a while, they would mourn him, because they were good people, the best, and he was sorry for that – but eventually they would see that their lives were better without him in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

379. “The next day, he presented Willem with a list of twenty reasons why he shouldn’t want to be with him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

380. “He loved knowing that in those moments, he was making Jude happy, loved knowing that Jude wanted affection and that he was the person who was allowed to provide it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “For the first time in his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

387. “He closes his eyes, not because he’s tired but because it’s a perfect moment, and he knows how to enjoy them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

388. “A sad thing, when you had to sponge off of your boyfriend in publishing because he made more than you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

390. “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

391. “Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

392. “He was a chair, a clock, a scarf draped over the back of the settee, something the eye had registered so many times that it now glided over it, its presence so familiar that it had already been drawn and pasted into the scene before the curtain rose.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

393. “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

394. “Luke had taught him how to find pleasure in life, and he had removed pleasure absolutely.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

395. “His mother’s house was a familiar land, a place where he would always be revered, where every custom and tradition felt tailored to him and his particular needs.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

396. “She tries so hard to give me what she thinks I want. But all I want is for her to one day come home and tell me that she saw something funny or beautiful or exciting or scary – all I want for her is the ability to tell herself a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

397. “Oh, he thinks, if I were a better person. If I were a more generous person. If I were a less self-involved person. If I were a braver person.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

398. “He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

399. “The cologne, the ritual with the shirt: they are two pieces of the scaffolding, rickety and fragile as it is, that he has learned to erect in order to keep moving forward, to keep living his life. 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

400. “How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all?”

— Hanya Yanagihara