Top 100 Hanya Yanagihara Quotes
#1. He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.
Hanya Yanagihara
#2. I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.
Hanya Yanagihara
#3. The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.
Hanya Yanagihara
#4. I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.
Hanya Yanagihara
#5. I love how Vietnamese cuisine always tastes like flowers, and how they had the ingenious idea of pairing that floral flavor with seafood: such a combination shouldn't work as well as it does.
Hanya Yanagihara
#6. I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he sacrificed it.
Hanya Yanagihara
#7. 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
#8. But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities.
Hanya Yanagihara
#9. 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
#10. Yeah, I know you think I'm a fucking moron, but I can figure it out if you only use small words,
Hanya Yanagihara
#11. Oh god, I thought, can nothing in this jungle behave as it ought? Must fruits move and trees breathe and freshwater rivers taste of the ocean? Why must nothing obey the laws of nature? Why must everything point so heavily toward the existence of enchantment?
Hanya Yanagihara
#12. Sometimes, of course, there's no quick way to make it through immigration: Different airports have gluts of incoming flights at different times of day, and short of rearranging your flight schedule to ensure you'll land at a low-traffic hour, there's nothing you can do.
Hanya Yanagihara
#13. 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
#14. I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap.
Hanya Yanagihara
#15. But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?
Hanya Yanagihara
#16. His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?
Hanya Yanagihara
#17. 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
#19. How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all?
Hanya Yanagihara
#20. They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion).
Hanya Yanagihara
#21. pain that would extend down his spine into one leg or the other, like a wooden stake set aflame and thrust into him:
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. 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
#24. He tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.
Hanya Yanagihara
#25. lunches at which everyone segregated themselves by rank and caste -
Hanya Yanagihara
#26. I have never wanted a family. I don't believe in marriage, though I obviously believe it should be legal for everyone who wants to do it. But it is not something I believe in, nor do the characters in my book, nor do any of my friends.
Hanya Yanagihara
#27. Sometimes he found himself resenting the others' definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it:
Hanya Yanagihara
#28. I wanted to see how flavors, spices, and grains traveled back and forth along the Silk Road and were interpreted by a multitude of cultures' palates.
Hanya Yanagihara
#29. Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not?
Hanya Yanagihara
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.
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. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted so much time
It means nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.
Hanya Yanagihara
#40. But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face - I still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you, and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed.
Hanya Yanagihara
#41. Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.
Hanya Yanagihara
#42. Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero.
Hanya Yanagihara
#43. Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.
Hanya Yanagihara
#44. You will learn to see your life - all of our lives - as a series of agreements,
Hanya Yanagihara
#45. 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
#46. What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.
Hanya Yanagihara
#47. 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
#48. I don't believe in post-racial or post-gay or post-anything, but I do think within a certain group of friends, what matters less is the specificities of race and sexuality, and what matters more is the shared experience, shared language and shared cultural touch points.
Hanya Yanagihara
#49. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
Hanya Yanagihara
#50. The thought of seeing Malcolm and JB, of interacting with them and smiling and joking, seemed suddenly excruciating.
Hanya Yanagihara
#51. 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
#52. Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him to want, never occurred to him he might have:
Hanya Yanagihara
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.
Hanya Yanagihara
#56. 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
#57. I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him.
Hanya Yanagihara
#58. 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
#59. So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
Hanya Yanagihara
#60. I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
Hanya Yanagihara
#61. 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
#62. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. I
Hanya Yanagihara
#63. 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
#64. Fair is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration.
Hanya Yanagihara
#65. One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#66. He longed for that year right after the injury, before he met Andy, when it seemed that everything might be improved upon, and that his future self might be something bright and clean, when he knew so little but had such hope, and faith that his hope might one day be rewarded.
Hanya Yanagihara
#67. 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
#68. At five thirty, the light was perfect: buttery and dense and fat somehow, swelling the room as it had the train into something expansive and hopeful.
Hanya Yanagihara
#69. Without them, one's status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself , and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity
Hanya Yanagihara
#70. I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it.
Hanya Yanagihara
#71. I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.
Hanya Yanagihara
#72. 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
#73. I know my life's meaningful because" - and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued - " because I'm a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.
Hanya Yanagihara
#75. But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself - his very life - has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes.
Hanya Yanagihara
#76. But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had been worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a life that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read about in books.
Hanya Yanagihara
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Felt for a minute frightened by the jungle, its voracious appetite and ambition, its hunger to consume every surface it encountered.
Hanya Yanagihara
#81. Gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold.
Hanya Yanagihara
#82. 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
#83. He had simply let his life be dictated to him by others, following one man after the next, the way he had been taught to do.
Hanya Yanagihara
#84. Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be." At
Hanya Yanagihara
#85. Of course, no one has enough time to see every shop that Mumbai has: That would take more lifetimes than even the gods could offer.
Hanya Yanagihara
#86. This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew.
Hanya Yanagihara
#87. It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they'd ever read.
Hanya Yanagihara
#88. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people's words! - it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.
Hanya Yanagihara
#89. 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
#90. But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music
Hanya Yanagihara
#91. I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it.
Hanya Yanagihara
#92. that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#93. We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.
Hanya Yanagihara
#94. JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable.
Hanya Yanagihara
#95. You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.
Hanya Yanagihara
#96. 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
#97. It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow.
Hanya Yanagihara
#98. Harold, Julia - are you kidding? There's nothing - nothing - I've ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought - He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#99. Harold," he says, although Andy is still talking, "release me. Release me from my promise to you. Don't make me do this anymore. Don't make me go on.
Hanya Yanagihara
#100. Those of us lucky enough to fall in love with Asia know that it's an affair that's as long as it is resonant.
Hanya Yanagihara
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