Top 100 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes
#1. To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he'd had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him
Hanya Yanagihara
#2. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Hanya Yanagihara
#3. And now you've been so fucking spoiled by things coming to you so easily that you think everything's just going to happen for you.
Hanya Yanagihara
#4. 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
#5. Sometimes, all he has to do is sit up, and he will be reminded, as if slapped across the face, that his body owns him, not the other way around.
Hanya Yanagihara
#6. 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
#7. Thought of drugs the way he thought of desserts, which he also loved: a consumable that had been forbidden to him as a child and which was now freely available.
Hanya Yanagihara
#8. In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.
Hanya Yanagihara
#9. I think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids.
Hanya Yanagihara
#10. From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.
Hanya Yanagihara
#11. Their world is governed by children, little despots whose needs - school and camp and activities and tutors - dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen years[...] Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction.
Hanya Yanagihara
#12. that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#13. But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music
Hanya Yanagihara
#14. Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be." At
Hanya Yanagihara
#15. Gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold.
Hanya Yanagihara
#16. Felt for a minute frightened by the jungle, its voracious appetite and ambition, its hunger to consume every surface it encountered.
Hanya Yanagihara
#17. It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.'
'Please,' I said.
And then he did.
Hanya Yanagihara
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969.
Hanya Yanagihara
#22. The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life.
Hanya Yanagihara
#23. After. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent,
Hanya Yanagihara
#24. You'll find your own way to discuss what happened to you. You'll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone. But your life - no matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it has been your fault. Will you remember that?
Hanya Yanagihara
#25. Yeah, I know you think I'm a fucking moron, but I can figure it out if you only use small words,
Hanya Yanagihara
#26. The particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.
Hanya Yanagihara
#27. I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap.
Hanya Yanagihara
#28. The thought of seeing Malcolm and JB, of interacting with them and smiling and joking, seemed suddenly excruciating.
Hanya Yanagihara
#29. 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
#30. It had been a useful skill, this persistent and unshatterable somnambulism, and it had protected him, but then that ability, like his ability to forget,
Hanya Yanagihara
#31. He has tasted anger, and he knows he has to control it. He can feel it, waiting to burst from his mouth in a swarm of stinging black flies.
Hanya Yanagihara
#32. In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's.
Hanya Yanagihara
#33. I didn't like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone.
Hanya Yanagihara
#34. It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime's worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.
Hanya Yanagihara
#35. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#36. I don't think the reader needs protecting. If you guide the reader steadily, they'll follow you.
Hanya Yanagihara
#37. I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way.
Hanya Yanagihara
#38. All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
Hanya Yanagihara
#39. I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.
Hanya Yanagihara
#40. He feels he isn't so much living as he is merely existing,
Hanya Yanagihara
#42. Pg 685 And so home he goes, and he waits and waits for Willem to appear to him. But he doesn't, and finally he sleeps.
Hanya Yanagihara
#43. 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
#44. S if lack of privilege were a competition that he was still determined to win, even in the face of another's clear and inarguable triumph.
Hanya Yanagihara
#45. Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.
Hanya Yanagihara
#46. I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.
Hanya Yanagihara
#47. My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.
Hanya Yanagihara
#48. It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire ... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.
Hanya Yanagihara
#49. Once you join the queue for the immigration line, pay attention to what the expeditor tells you. Have your papers ready. Don't have your cell phone out. Take off your hat. Open your passport to the page with your photo and present it to the immigration officer already open.
Hanya Yanagihara
#50. One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.
Hanya Yanagihara
#51. Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.
Hanya Yanagihara
#52. When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.
Hanya Yanagihara
#53. We're all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn't mean they weren't happy years, that it wasn't a happy life. He
Hanya Yanagihara
#54. I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends.
Hanya Yanagihara
#55. Valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right
Hanya Yanagihara
#56. 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
#57. My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned.
Hanya Yanagihara
#58. Blithe; he seething - until they had left the restaurant and started
Hanya Yanagihara
#59. Video, ergo est," said Laurence, suddenly. I see it, therefore it is.
Hanya Yanagihara
#60. but he had seen lots of women behave this way around Willem. They all had. Their friend Lionel used to say that Willem must have been a fisherman in a past life, because he couldn't help but attract pussy.
Hanya Yanagihara
#61. 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
#63. I was raised Catholic," he began. "But you're not now?" the judge asked, frowning. "No," he said. He had worked for years to keep the apology out of his voice when he said this.
Hanya Yanagihara
#64. His dithering seemed silly. He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him - he trusted himself with that much.
Hanya Yanagihara
#65. It was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others.
Hanya Yanagihara
#66. The awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable.
Hanya Yanagihara
#67. Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were.
Hanya Yanagihara
#68. Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult.
Hanya Yanagihara
#69. Flora had not seemed to mind the excessive amount of time their parents demanded from them, which had meant that he could spend more time in his room working on his model houses and less time downstairs in the den, fidgeting through one of his father's interminable Ozu film festivals.
Hanya Yanagihara
#70. An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas.
Hanya Yanagihara
#71. I think at first I didn't tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did.
Hanya Yanagihara
#73. Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop.
Hanya Yanagihara
#74. He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories;
Hanya Yanagihara
#75. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law - although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#76. The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.
Hanya Yanagihara
#77. The term 'pashmina' is often used interchangeably with 'cashmere,' but in reality, pashmina is a specific type of very fine, lofty cashmere, woven from a specific type of goat - one indigenous to northern India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and harvested and woven there as well.
Hanya Yanagihara
#78. Now was not the time to get ensnared in something new and complicated, and he didn't really have the energy for a one-night hookup which, he knew, had a funny way of becoming as exhausting as something longer-term.
Hanya Yanagihara
#79. Won't bother you, and you'll be safe here. You think you can manage grace at the table for a little privacy and guaranteed security?" She looked at him and smiled. He nodded. "Besides," she continued, "you can always call me if you want to talk sin.
Hanya Yanagihara
#80. he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don't visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost.
Hanya Yanagihara
#81. It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues.
Hanya Yanagihara
#82. The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer.
Hanya Yanagihara
#84. Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life.
Hanya Yanagihara
#85. We think of writing a book as a process, but the very word - process - suggests that there is one: a template to follow, a map to guide us. If that were true, someone would have surely figured out some marketable method we could all buy.
Hanya Yanagihara
#86. The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango.
Hanya Yanagihara
#87. 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
#88. No religion makes more use of color than Hinduism, with its blue-skinned gods and peony-lipped goddesses, and even the spring festival of Holi is focused on color: Boys squirt arcs of dyed water on passersby or dump powder, all violently hued, on their marks.
Hanya Yanagihara
#89. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
Right and wrong, however, are for - well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.
Hanya Yanagihara
#90. 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
#91. Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.
Hanya Yanagihara
#92. Opposite Willem that afternoon is a Thom Gunn poem: "Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed." Underneath, someone has written in black market, "Dont worry man I cant get no pussy either.
Hanya Yanagihara
#93. But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.
Hanya Yanagihara
#94. Pg 623 When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another:
Confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy.
Hanya Yanagihara
#95. The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they'd told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude's father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged.
Hanya Yanagihara
#96. He can't live once more through those fifteen years, those fifteen years whose half-life have been so long and so resonant, that have determined everything he had become and done.
Hanya Yanagihara
#97. him - I was always happy to play the fool if I thought it might give him some pleasure -
Hanya Yanagihara
#98. It had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.
Hanya Yanagihara
#99. 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,
Hanya Yanagihara
#100. Harold sighs. "Jude," he says, "there's not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don't get to a certain age and it stops.
Hanya Yanagihara
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