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Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “And even before I knew what his smile looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “He wasn’t like Harold or Citizen – he was practical; he knew that making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities, but it still troubled him, this forsaking of what he knew to be just.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “He will study the back of Jude’s head, because Jude can’t face him, and imagine the person he thinks he knows collapsing into rubble, clouds of dust gusting around him, as nearby, teams of artisans try to rebuild him in another material, in another shape, as a different person than the person who had stood for years and years. On and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor: blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans,” he said. “Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I’m not sure what’s going on with you lot. You’re making money. You’ve achieved something. 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 Quote: “His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “Normally at parties he grabbed or was grabbed by a group of people, and spent the night as the nuclei for a variety of three- or foursomes, bounding from one to the next, gathering the gossip, starting harmless rumors, pretending to share confidences, getting others to tell him who they hated by divulging hatreds of his own.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “It is wonderful, and rare, being out of the city, being back at their house, and the four of them enjoy one another’s company. He even feels well enough to give Andy an abbreviated tour of the property, which Andy has visited only in springtime or summer, but which is different in autumn: raw, sad, lovely, the barn’s roof plastered with fallen yellow gingko leaves that make it look as if it’s been laid with sheets of gold leaf.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “When Jacob was a baby, I would find myself feeling more assured with each month he lived, as if the longer he stayed in this world, the more deeply he would become anchored to it, as if by being alive, he was staking claim to life itself.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “When he at last gave her the statement – which he’d written as plainly as possible, and had imagined while writing it that he was in fact writing about someone else, someone he had known once but had never had to talk to again – she read it through once, impassive, before nodding at him.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “Try not to try too hard; it’s just a lovely ride.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself – they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn’t speak: Farsi, Urdu, Mandarin, Portuguese. Once, he tried to write some things down, thinking that it might be easier, but it wasn’t – he is unclear how to explain himself to himself.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “But maybe, he thinks, maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe he can pretend one more time, and this last bout of pretending will change things for him, will make him into the person he might have been.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “He knew that making a career as a lawyer meant, sacrifices, either of money, or of moralities.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “If your body was well, you expected it to perform for you, excellently, consistently. If your body was not, your expectations were different.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “They spent their days making beautiful things.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “Was this what being a child with a parent was like? Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “It was as if every aspect of his face was determined to be a soloist, rather than a member of an ensemble.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident:.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I would rather have you suffering and alive-than dead.”
Hanya Yanagihara Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “He was pleasantly exhausted, but then he was always exhausted those days: it was as if the daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else.”
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