Top 500 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “He had asked for responsibility without understanding completely how much damage he could do.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

402. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

419. “He was so far gone from himself, from who he had hoped to be, that it was as if he was no longer a boy at all but something else entirely. This was his life now, and there was nothing he could do about it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

421. “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

422. “I’m sorry, Andy,” he whispers.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

426. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

428. “What about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he knew enough by then – he was a fast learner – to simply shrug and say, with a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” He was astonished but relieved by how easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

432. “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

433. “And the dead can speak to no one.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

439. “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

440. “He takes a breath. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve decided to stay.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

441. “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

442. “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

443. “He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

444. “Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

445. “Around her he had felt none of the constant anxiety, nor watchfulness, that he seemed condemned to feel around everyone else; the vigilance was exhausting, but it eventually became simply a part of life, a habit like good posture.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

446. “And even before I knew what his smile looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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