Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

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.

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.)

That's your dad talking, Mal. Your life won't be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don't have kids.

lunches at which everyone segregated themselves by rank and caste -

There is something uniquely American about the motel: It speaks to the transient nature of America itself, one enabled and encouraged by our roads and highways.

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.

I had thought to seize the image in my head and preserve it in wax, so that I might always be able to look upon it as one of those rare moments in which one senses the plates of the world shift beneath one and life is forever altered: on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.

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.

When we think of India, most of us are in fact thinking of Rajasthan, that large splotch of dun-colored desert in the country's northwest which, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was ruled by a succession of maharajas whose sense of color, opulence, and splendor created the most enduring images of India in the West.

They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.

But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music

I have never found it difficult, as some do, to speak to children. All one has to do is pretend that they're some kind of intelligent farm animal: a pig, perhaps, or a horse.

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

Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them all.

In recent years he has gone from being embarrassed about crying at all to crying constantly to himself to crying around Willem to now, in the final falling away of his dignity, crying in front of anyone, at any time, over anything.

It was like any relationship, he felt - it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn't it wither?

And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. 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.

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.

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.

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.

pg 674 "let me get better or let me end it

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.

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.

When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant orbit that had nothing to do with him.

New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition

Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of lonliness 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.

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.

One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.

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.

When your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.
But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.
Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.
And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

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

Finally and essentially: I not only never could have, but never would have, written this book without the conversations with - and the kindness, grace, empathy, forgiveness, and wisdom of - Jared Hohlt, my first and favorite reader, secret keeper, and North Star. His beloved friendship is the greatest gift of my adulthood.

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.

I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all - and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.

But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.) "Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?" he'd asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past summer, and Harold had laughed. "Look, Willem," he said, "I think you're doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm's dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You're young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live.

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.

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

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.

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

But you need someone who can grow old with you.

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.

Something about the fall, the freshness of the pain, had been restorative. It was honest pain, clear pain, a pain without shame or filth, and it was a different sensation than he had felt in years ... before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was tossing himself against the brick wall, and as he did so, he imagined he was knocking out of himself every piece of dirt, every trace of liquid, every memory of the past few years. He was resetting himself; he was returning himself to something pure; he was punishing himself for what he had done. After that, he felt better, energized.

You spent so much time explaining yourself, your work to others - what it meant, what you were trying to accomplish, why you had chosen the colors and subject matter and materials and application and technique that you had - that it was a relief to simply be with another person to whom you didn't have to explain anything.

We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there.

Here, however, you made art because it was the only thing you've ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils.

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.

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.

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

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

He will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and most wretched moments, the one that asks him who he thinks he is to inconvenience so many people, to think he has the right to keep going when even his own body tells him he should stop.

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?

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

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.

I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care.

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.

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.

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.

The thought of seeing Malcolm and JB, of interacting with them and smiling and joking, seemed suddenly excruciating.

All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry.

We think of the 1950s as an oppressive time in the culture, and indeed it was, but it was also in many ways a more secular moment, and one in which great scientific achievements flourished. I don't want to get too gauzy about this, but there was much more respect for science as a necessary part of society.

... and they taught me - everything, really. They made me, and make me, into someone better than I really am.

There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't.

... for his ability to make you see the world anew.

And if we are being philosophical - which we today are - we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.

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.

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.

If the only thing you knew about Oman was its location, you might never go at all.

He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem's torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning toward something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem's smiles, he knows Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant was happy. Willem's face and neck dominate the canvas, and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table; he knows it from the way JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem's face. He has the sense that if he says Willem's name, the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem's hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn't do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. "The title's card's been mounted already," JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title - Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street - and he feels his breath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea.

But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship.

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

In those months I thought often of what I was trying to do, of how hard it is to keep alive someone who doesn't want to stay alive.

That was what I thought: that I would rather have him suffering and alive - than dead.

Pg 621 We are 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

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.

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.

He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday - cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold - and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days:

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.

My life, he will think, my life. But he won't be able to think beyond this, and he will keep repeating the words to himself - part chant, part curse, part reassurance - as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life.

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.

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities.

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers
he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money
and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.

Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn't happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren't necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.

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.

His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself - they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn't speak: Farsi, Urdu, Mandarin, Portuguese. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people.

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.

that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them.

As the months and then the years passed, they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the manufacturer's box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life.

Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses.

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?

flibbertigibbets - and

And yet he wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day.