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

402. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “He feels his past is a cancer, one he should have treated long ago but instead ignored. And now Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor have metastasized, now they are too large and too overwhelming for him to eliminate.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

415. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “Sometimes he found himself resenting the others’ definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it:.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

429. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

434. “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

435. “Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “Ze zochten allemaal naar iets wat alleen van hen was, iets om de angstwekkende omvang en de onvoorstelbaarheid van de wereld en van de meedogenloos wegtikkende minuten, uren en dagen op afstand te houden.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

446. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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