Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

362. “Try not to try too hard; it’s just a lovely ride.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

363. “We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

364. “Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

365. “For the first time in decades, he isn’t cutting himself at all. If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him. He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “Jude- if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exactly as you are- then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be your fault.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

371. “And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

372. “Oh god, he thought, oh god. But it was as if his mind was a bit of machinery caught uselessly in a groove, and he couldn’t think beyond those two words. It was too bright in the waiting room, and he tried to relax, but he couldn’t for the phrase beating its rhythm like a heartbeat, thudding through his body like a second pulse: Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

373. “But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? But then, a sole option was no option at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

374. “When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant orbit that had nothing to do with him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

375. “How can you call yourself a parent if your child feels this way about himself? That was something I would never be able to recalibrate. I suppose – having never parented an adult myself – that I had never known how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent having to do it: I felt only stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it earlier. After all, I had been an adult with a parent, and I had turned to my father constantly.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

376. “These things belonged here, in this house: it was as if the house itself had grown them, as if they were something living that would shrivel and die were they moved elsewhere. And then he thought: was the same not true for him? Was he not also something the house had, if not spawned, then nourished and fed? If he left Washington Square, how would he ever know where he truly was in the world? How could he leave these walls that had stared blankly, plainly back at him through all of his states?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

378. “They spent their days making beautiful things.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

379. “He sensed that JB – who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well – was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

380. “Over their early dinner, he tried to thank Harold again, but every time he tried, Harold stopped him with increasing impatience. “Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?” he finally asked.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

381. “His silence was both a necessity and a protection, and had the added benefit of making him appear more mysterious and more interesting than he knew he was.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

382. “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

383. “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

384. “It was as if every aspect of his face was determined to be a soloist, rather than a member of an ensemble.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

385. “Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

386. “Poor Fa’a,” I said, although my answer was more reflexive than anything else. He was a good, kind person, and although I thought he was being melodramatic, I appreciated his compassion. In the absence of action, Poor Fa’a seemed to be the only thing to say.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

387. “Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world... He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when 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

388. “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

389. “On these days, he succumbed to a sort of enchantment, a state in which his life seemed both unimprovable and, paradoxically, perfectly fixable: Of course Jude wouldn’t get worse. Of course he could be repaired. Of course Willem would be the person to repair him. Of course this was possible; of course this was probable. Days like this seemed to have no nights, and if there were no nights, there was no cutting, there was no sadness, there was nothing to dismay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

390. “Though, of course – if you were here, wouldn’t he still be here as well?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

391. “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

392. “He thought of his days the way he thought of taking steps when he was experiencing the pain and numbness in his feet: he would get through one, and then the next, and then the next, and eventually things would get better. Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and accept them and keep going. He always had.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

393. “He knows how irrational it seems, his desire to keep his legs, his legs that have caused him so many problems, that have cost him how many hours, how much money, how much pain to maintain? But still: They are his. They are his legs.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

394. “I would rather have you suffering and alive-than dead.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

395. “He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. ‘Hemming!’ he shouts, and then, nonsensically, ‘Wait for me!’ And he beings to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet trike the ground beneath him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

396. “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

397. “I had always been told that I should try to live my life with happiness, but could happiness give you the zeal, the energy, that anger clearly could?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

398. “I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life – which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling – was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

399. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara