Hanya Yanagihara Quotes & Sayings

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

And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don't often do well in law school, but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

Gods are for stories and heavens and other realms; they are not to be seen by men. But when we encroach on their world, when we see what we are not meant to see, how can anything but disaster follow? — Hanya Yanagihara

He had been able to convince himself that he was someone else, someone happier, someone freer and braver. But now Willem is gone, and he is again who he was twenty, thirty, forty years ago. — Hanya Yanagihara

He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; — Hanya Yanagihara

That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend - if he concentrates - are Willem's arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it. — Hanya Yanagihara

The daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better. — Hanya Yanagihara

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him. — Hanya Yanagihara

I know how you feel, Willem," Andy had said in one of their secret conversations, "but he doesn't want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life. — Hanya Yanagihara

Felt for a minute frightened by the jungle, its voracious appetite and ambition, its hunger to consume every surface it encountered. — Hanya Yanagihara

His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling - as he often did - as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us - — Hanya Yanagihara

But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

You won't understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are - not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving - and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad - or good - it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well. — Hanya Yanagihara

I don't think the reader needs protecting. If you guide the reader steadily, they'll follow you. — Hanya Yanagihara

His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around. Now he cannot find a way out of it, even when he wants to. He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work, and his hands scrabble uselessly against the ice's slick. He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn't say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

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

If he sacrifices his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won; he will be surrendering to him, to that night in the field with the — Hanya Yanagihara

Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

he feels his breath abandon him; — Hanya Yanagihara

A sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace. — Hanya Yanagihara

You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don't need to worry - they don't happen as often as they should. But when they do, it's up to the good people to just say 'thank you,' and move on, and maybe consider that the person who's doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn't in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he's done the nice thing doesn't think he deserves it or isn't worthy of it. — Hanya Yanagihara

The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is rarely true. — Hanya Yanagihara

I felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

There is a point - for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago - when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream. — Hanya Yanagihara

I did something worse than accepting it: I tolerated it. I chose to forget he was doing this, because it was too difficult to find a solution, and because I wanted to enjoy him as the person he wanted us to see, even though I knew better. I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of night, he sacrificed it. I would rebuke him and try to reason with him, even though I knew those methods didn't work, and even knowing that, I didn't try something else: something more radical, something that might alienate me from him. — Hanya Yanagihara

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. 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

converted, how the remaining villagers on Ivu'ivu, — Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

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

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout's gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller's property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness? — Hanya Yanagihara

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

The photo had been taken at the opening of JB's fifth, long-delayed show, 'Frog and Toad,' which had been exclusively images of the two of them, but very blurred, and more abstract than JB's previous work. (They hadn't quite known what to think of the series title, though JB had claimed it was affectionate. 'Arnold Lobel?' he had screeched at them when they asked him about it. 'Hello?!' But neither he nor Willem had read Lobel's books as children, and they'd had to go out and buy them to make sense of the reference.) — Hanya Yanagihara

He would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving person. — Hanya Yanagihara

Maybe he was wrong, he sometimes thought. Maybe it would be nice to confess to someone that most of the time he could barely relate to what was being discussed, that he couldn't participate in everyone else's shared language of childhood pratfalls and frustrations. But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak. Although — Hanya Yanagihara

It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have to be two distinct realms, 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

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

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

And although he tried every day to remember the promise he'd made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he'd read long ago. — Hanya Yanagihara

Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault. — Hanya Yanagihara

Of course, you can't literally think like this all the time, or you'd drive yourself crazy. And so for most lawyers, a house is, finally, just a house, something to fill and fix and repaint and empty. But there's a period in which every law student - every good law student - finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realizes that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life, escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable. He — Hanya Yanagihara

And although [he] posed each as a discrete quandary, he knew that in reality each one was inseparable from the last, and that if it had been grammatically and linguistically possible to ask all of them together in one big question, then that would be the truest expression of why he was where he was. — Hanya Yanagihara

If you love home - and even if you don't - there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back. That week, even the things that would irritate you - the alarm waahing from some car at three in the morning; the pigeons who come to clutter and cluck on the windowsill behind your bed when you're trying to sleep in - seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it. — Hanya Yanagihara

And now he is once again finding life more and more difficult, each day a little less possible than the last. In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow's sole prosthetic, and it is from this branch that he hangs. Above him a rain is always misting, which makes the branch slippery. But he clings to it, as tired as he is, because beneath him is a hole bored into the earth so deep that he cannot see where it ends. He is petrified to let go because he will fall into the hole, but eventually he knows he will, he knows he must: he is so tired. His grasp weakens a bit, just a little bit, with every week.
So it is with guilt and regret, but also with a sense of inevitability, that he cheats on his promise to Harold. — Hanya Yanagihara

Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit. — Hanya Yanagihara

None of them really wanted to listen to someone else's story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own. — Hanya Yanagihara

Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life. — Hanya Yanagihara

Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone. — Hanya Yanagihara

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things 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 those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

Therapy, therapists, promised a rigorous lack of judgment (but wasn't that an impossibility, to talk to a person and not be judged?), and yet behind every question was a nudge, one that pushed you gently but inexorably toward a recognition of some flaw, toward solving a problem you hadn't known existed. — Hanya Yanagihara

And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child's whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tenderness, of fondness, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent's reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness. — Hanya Yanagihara

Or," JB had continued, "you have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don't even apply to you." JB had turned toward him, then, and he had felt himself freeze with a momentary terror. "Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don't know what race he is, we don't know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past." He smiled at him, presumably to show he was at least partly joking. "The post-man. Jude the Postman." "The Postman, — Hanya Yanagihara

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

And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? 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? Why wasn't it even better? — Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

He joined Jude in the kitchen and began making a salad, and JB slumped to the dining-room table and started flipping through a novel Jude had left there. "I read this," he called over to him. "Do you want to know what happens in the end?"
"No, JB," said Jude. "I'm only halfway through."
"The minister character dies after all."
"JB!"
After that, JB's mood seemed to improve. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

I have only a few really enviable skills, but packing - condensing just the right amount of stuff into a single bag, whether the trip is for a weekend or, as in this case, seven weeks - is one of them. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

It is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind. — Hanya Yanagihara

You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

But mostly, I missed watching you two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly, sincerely affectionate you were with him; missed watching you listen to each other, the way you both did so intently. — Hanya Yanagihara

pg 674 "let me get better or let me end it — Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

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

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

I was interested about how relationships change as you get older. You are great friends in your 20s. In your 30s, you get married. Your 40s are all about your kids. In your 50s, you get divorced, and your friendships become primary again. — Hanya Yanagihara

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. When — Hanya Yanagihara

What's your favorite axiom? (The nerd pickup line, — Hanya Yanagihara

It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn't have the energy to try. — Hanya Yanagihara

It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they'd ever read. — Hanya Yanagihara

He was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. — Hanya Yanagihara

He wasn't so elderly after all, I saw: probably just a few years older than I. And yet I was never able (and am still not) to think of myself as old. I talked as if I knew I was; I bemoaned my age. But it was only for comedy, or to make other people feel young. — Hanya Yanagihara

I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap. — Hanya Yanagihara

Fucking with one's therapist - even if one's therapist truly deserved to be fucked with - was the sort of thing you did when you were nineteen, not when you were thirty-nine. — Hanya Yanagihara