Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvellous years were not behind them.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

352. “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

353. “And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?” – as all around him, the apartment filled with light.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

354. “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

355. “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

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. “All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

359. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand. But.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

384. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

386. “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

387. “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

388. “Who could know if Felix would ever have friends? Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged. He waved goodbye at Felix’s small back, retreating already into the house, and although he would never have said so to Felix, he somehow fancied that this was why Felix was so wan all the time: it was because Felix had already figured this out long ago; it was because he already knew.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara