Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

421. “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

422. “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

423. “But time, I have come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs. We speak of managing time, but it is the opposite. Our lives are filled with businesses because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

424. “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

425. “They were still singing when the doorbell chimed... but as he was standing, Jude put his hand on his wrist, and they remained there, Jude sitting, he standing, until they had sung the last words of the song, and only after they had finished did he go to answer the door. Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he’d found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn’t known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

426. “He had felt, then, a great surge of gratitude, because he knew Andy didn’t think it looked good, would never think it looked good. To Andy, his body was an onslaught of terrors, one against which the two of them had to be constantly attentive. He knew Andy thought he was self-destructive, or delusional, or in denial.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

427. “It was a time he rarely thought about, his flight to Philadelphia, because it was a period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; there had been times in those weeks when he had opened his eyes and was genuinely unable to discern whether what had just happened had actually happened, or whether he had imagined it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

429. “We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap – if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

430. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

432. “People adore nothing more than to speak of themselves, and if you ever find yourself in a circumstance in which you fear your place or standing then all you must do is ask the other person something about him or herself, and they will forever after be convinced that you are the most fascinating individual they have ever encountered.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

433. “But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real. In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

434. “Who would I be, without this guilt, this sorrow, and the sorrow about the guilt?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

435. “He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

436. “Dit is mijn wereldje, en ik weet niet wat ik er moet beginnen.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

437. “The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us – when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

438. “He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

439. “Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

440. “Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have nothing to write about.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

441. “I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life-food, shelter, weaponry-being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

442. “But he has overseen their house himself, and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says, “I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

443. “He wanted the reminders to stop; he dreaded the day when they would. In recent weeks he’d had the sense that Willem was receding from him, even as his grief refused to diminish in intensity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

444. “He was aware, suddenly, of how exhausted, how utterly depleted he was, as much by the past few weeks of anxiety as well as the past thirty years of craving, of wanting, of wishing so intensely even as he told himself he didn’t care, that by the time they had toasted one another and first Julia and then Harold had hugged him – the sensation of being held by Harold so unfamiliar and intimate that he had nearly squirmed – he was relieved when Harold told him to leave the damn dishes and go to bed.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

445. “The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

446. “For what more could we presume to ask from death – but kindnesss?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

447. “He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

448. “In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. 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

449. “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

450. “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