Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feels sorry for him because they assume his singlehood is not his decision but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

402. “These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from ‘Frog and Toad,’ and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB’s studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts – a second heart, a second brain – to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

403. “And yet he wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

404. “I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

405. “He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was – terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing – he felt with Caleb.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

406. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

408. “He knew Andy thought he was self-destructive, or delusional, or in denial. But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

413. “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

414. “But you need someone who can grow old with you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

415. “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

416. “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

417. “But he understood, primally almost, the concept of losing, of loosing oneself from the world, of disappearing into a different place, one of retreat and safety, of the twinned yearnings of escape and discovery.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

418. “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

419. “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

420. “But getting frustrated with your paintings – and it was impossible not to think of your work as your colleague and co-participant, as if it was something that sometimes decided to be agreeable and collaborate with you, and sometimes decided to be truculent and unyielding, like a grouchy toddler – was just what happened. You had to just keep doing it, and doing it, and one day, you’d get it right.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

421. “JB’s ambition was fueled by a lust for that future, for his speedy arrival to it; Jude’s, he thought, was motivated more by a fear that if he didn’t move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left...”

— Hanya Yanagihara

422. “It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return. More troubling to him than his.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

423. “How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

424. “But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

425. “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

426. “There is something very wrong with this world, he thinks, a world in which of the four of them – him, JB, Willem, and Malcolm – the two best people, the two kindest and most thoughtful, have died, and the two poorer examples of humanity have survived. At least JB is talented; he deserves to live. But he can think of no reason why he might.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

427. “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

428. “Now he looked at couples – in restaurants, on the street, at parties – and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

429. “I don’t think the reader needs protecting. If you guide the reader steadily, they’ll follow you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

430. “Does he seem listless, out of sorts?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

431. “You don’t know what it’s like being a gay actor in this business.” “I don’t really think of myself as gay, though,” he began, and Kit rolled his eyes.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

432. “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

433. “Annika parlava a macchinetta e doveva aver deciso che la strategia migliore fosse trattare Willem come un’eclissi, limitandosi a non guardarlo.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

434. “Stay,” he calls out as he is taken from them. “Please stay. Please stay and give Willem some decent conversation,” and they agree they will; it isn’t even seven, after all – they have hours and hours. “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

435. “But although he hadn’t been convinced, it was somehow sustaining that someone else had seen him as a worthwhile person, that someone had seen his as a meaningful life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

436. “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

437. “Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was almost as good as the real thing.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

438. “Would he someday have the courage to give up, and would he be able to recognize that moment, or would he wake one day and look in the mirror and find himself an old man, still trying to call himself an actor because he was too scared to admit that he might not be, might never be?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

439. “He was tired, he was in pain, but it didn’t matter; his tiredness felt like something sweet and warm, his pain was familiar and expected, and in those moments he was aware that he was capable of joyfulness, that life was honeyed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

440. “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.” At the time, he’d laughed and called her melodramatic, and a reactionary man-hater, but that night, as he lay in bed, he had thought about what she said and wondered if she was correct.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

441. “Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and accept them and keep going. He always had.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

442. “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

443. “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

444. “To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he’d had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

445. “Every day, he thought about it, and thinking about it made things easier. Thinking about it gave him fortitude.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

446. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

448. “This was part of their game that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t know.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

449. “You were the one who got furthest with him. But I know you blamed yourself. I blamed myself, too. Because I did something worse than accepting it: I tolerated it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

450. “They are bound to each other by their mutual disgust and discomfort: Caleb tolerates his body, and he tolerates Caleb’s revulsion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara