Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

405. “There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

406. “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

407. “How fast, how distressingly fast, had their instinct for fear been reawakened, the fear itself a virus that lay dormant but that they would never be able to permanently dispel. Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

408. “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

409. “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

410. “One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life – its saving, its extension, its return – was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

411. “It was as if every aspect of his face was determined to be a soloist, rather than a member of an ensemble.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

428. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

430. “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

431. “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

432. “Sing me something that tells me something about you.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

449. “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

450. “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