Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “He wasn’t stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

403. “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

404. “I found, tucked between two books, two envelopes, our names in his handwriting. I opened my envelope, my heart thrumming, and saw my name – Dear Harold – and read his note from decades ago, from the day of his adoption and cried, sobbed, really, and then I slipped the disc into the computer and heard his voice, and although I would have cried anyway for its beauty, I cried more because it was his. And then Julia came home and found me and read her note and we cried all over again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

405. “He had been waiting for some sort of punishment for his arrogance, for thinking he could have what everyone else has, and here-at last- it was. This is what you get, said the voice inside his head. This is what you get for pretending to be someone you know you’re not for thinking you’re as good as other people.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

406. “Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of loneliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, that there is something strange and unnacceptable about the life he has.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

407. “He was never able to explain what the cutting did for him in a way he’d understand: how it was a form of punishment and also of cleansing, how if allowed him to drain everything toxic and spoiled from himself, how it kept him from being irrationally angry at others, at everyone, how it kept him from shouting, from violence, how it made him feel like his body, his life, was truly his and no one else’s.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

408. “This isn’t fair, he would think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

409. “There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

410. “It will soon be a new year,” his grandfather said into this silence, “and new years are always more revealing than old ones. You will make your decision, and it will be yes or no, and the years will keep ending and beginning and ending and beginning, whatever you choose.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

411. “It was as if his despair had given rise to a sense of invincibility; he felt that everything extraneous and soft had been burned off of him and he was left as an exposed steel core, indestructible and yet pliant, able to withstand anything.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

412. “He liked to pretend he was one of them, but he knew he was not.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

413. “Years ago, after the publication of my third book, a journalist once asked me if you could tell right away whether a student had a mind for law or not, and the answer is: Sometimes. But often, you’re wrong – the student who seemed so bright in the first half of the semester becomes steadily less so as the year goes on, and the student about whom you never thought one thing or another is the one who emerges as a dazzler, someone you love hearing think.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

414. “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

415. “Poor house! I thought, and at moments I would find myself stroking one of its whitepainted doorframes as if I were petting a horse’s nose: gently, slowly, trying to soothe it back to calmness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

416. “Jude seemed so confident, so competent, so certain that he, too, had something to offer.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

417. “I thought those thoughts all men think when a woman tells them she’s pregnant: What would the baby look like? Would I like it? Would I love it? And then, more crushingly: fatherhood. With all its responsibilities and fulfillments and tedium and possibilities for failure.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

418. “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

419. “It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

420. “Era capaz de diagnosticar con exactitud el estado en que cada uno de ellos se hallaba, pero incapaz de tomar decisiones.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

421. “After that, he learned not to say anything, because it seemed easier and better to lie than it was to be disbelieved.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

422. “It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

423. “At first, it had been disorienting, after so many years of operating as a foursome, but he had gotten used to it, and although he missed JB – his witty self-involvement, the way he could see everything the world had to offer only as it might affect him – he also found himself unable to forgive him and, simultaneously, able to see his life without him.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

424. “Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

425. “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

426. “He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Leary’s. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn’t. And of all the things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn’t.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

427. “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

428. “But it’s right.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

429. “And sometimes it was neither day nor night but somewhere in between, and there would be something strange and dusty about the light that made him imagine for a moment that there might after all be such a thing as heaven, and that he might after all have made it there. And then he would hear Ana’s voice, and remember again why he was there, and want to close his eyes all over again.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

430. “You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

431. “I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. I cannot promise that my granddaughter won’t be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone. I have made certain that her life will have a witness.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

432. “He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

433. “In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

434. “Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

435. “But he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

436. “And if he was to be honest, he was also flattered by JB’s jealousy: to JB, he wasn’t a cripple who was being cosmically repaid for a lousy run; he was JB’s equal, someone in whom JB saw only the things to envy and never the things to pity.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

437. “Maar wat was geluk anders dan een uitspatting, een onmogelijk vol te houden toestand, deels omdat die zo moeilijk te verwoorden was?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

439. “I have never been one of those people – I know you aren’t, either – who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

440. “An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

441. “James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

442. “He thought about how he could start, and plotted what he’d say in his head before he opened his mouth. Finally, he was ready. “I was always a greedy kid,” he began, and across the table, he watched Willem lean forward on his elbows, as for the first time in their friendship, he was the listener, and he was being told a story.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

443. “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

444. “How might things have been different if he spoke only one sentence? And that sentence could have been “Jude, are you trying to kill yourself?” or “Jude, you need to tell me what’s going on,” or “Jude, why do you do this to yourself?” Any of those would have been acceptable; any of those would have led to a larger conversation that would have been reparative, or at the very least preventative.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

445. “Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

446. “He will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

447. “You have to tell someone,” Ana used to say, and as he had grown older, he had decided to interpret this sentence literally: Some One. Someday, he thought, somehow, he would find a way to tell some one, one person. And then he had, someone he had trusted, and that person had died, and he didn’t have the fortitude to tell his story ever again. But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives – truly tell their lives – to one person?”

— Hanya Yanagihara

448. “Nathaniel always says h’s mature for his age, which is one of those things worried I think what he’s mature in is his loneliness. A child can be alone. But he shouldn’t be lonely. And our child is.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

449. “Concepuseram impreuna un om si impreuna il vazuseram murind. Uneori aveam impresia ca exista o legatura fizica intre noi, o franghie lunga, intinsa intre Boston si Portland; cand ea tragea de capatul ei, simteam eu socul in capatul meu. Oriunde se ducea ea, oriunde mergeam eu, firul acela dublu era acolo, tras si intins, fara a se rupe insa vreodata, incat fiecare clipa ne reamintea de ceea ce nu puteam sa mai avem vreodata.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

450. “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