Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

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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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
they both knew they could simply refuse if they really wanted to, and they both rarely did - after all, where else would they get to use their semaphores, that language that only had two speakers in the whole world? ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes, feeling the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one's gross inadequacy, of knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time I realized that as much as he was two people around us, so were we two people around him: we saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves not to see anything else. We Were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy: their unhappiness are our unhappiness, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast moving and negotiable. But his were not. We don't know how to help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems. But this is making excuses. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
But you need someone who can grow old with you. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Jaipur, like Florence or Kyoto, other artisan-rich cities to which it roughly compares, has always been known for its craftsmanship. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
In law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we're recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its ... elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
The question is which one of us is the frog and which is the toad,' Willem had said after they'd first seen the show, in JB's studio, and read the kindhearted books to each other late that night, laughing helplessly as they did.
He'd smiled; they had been lying in bed. 'Obviously, I'm the toad,' he said.
'No,' Willem said, 'I think you're the frog; your eyes are the same color as his skin.'
Willem sounded so serious that he grinned. 'That's your evidence?' he asked. 'And so what do you have in common with the toad?'
'I think I actually have a jacket like the one he has,' Willem said, and they began laughing again. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He liked too the specific and unexpected companionability of the place. There were times on the weekends when everyone was there at the same time, and at moments, he would emerge from the fog of his painting and sense that all of them were breathing in rhythm, panting almost, from the effort of concentrating. He could feel, then, the collective energy they were expending filling the air like gas, flammable and sweet, and would wish he could bottle it so that he might be able to draw from it when he was feeling uninspired, for the days in which he would sit in front of the canvas for literally hours, as though if he stared long enough, it might explode into something brilliant and charged. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Every traveler knows too well the endless quest for the perfect travel bag: the one that's stylish enough to carry through Paris, sturdy enough to tote around Peru, and - most important - doesn't make your shoulder sag even before you've loaded it up with everything you need for a day of sightseeing. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Pg 619 If he had been left to choose rather than forced to learn ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
I have never been one of those people - I know you aren't, either - who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them all. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
And in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parent's house, where the porch light washed the night with honey. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. He ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades - his life - searching bumblingly for a way out that didn't exist, had never existed. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
It is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
I have become lost to the world," he sings, quietly, "in which I otherwise wasted so much time. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He was trying to accept that there were certain things that would never conform to his idea of how life should be, no matter how intensely he hoped or pretended they might. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
An elegant mind wants elegant endings ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
his parents huffing after him; ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
The daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Who am I? Who am I?"
"You're Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You're the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You're the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs. You're a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen. You're a swimmer. You're a baker. You're a cook. You're a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You're an excellent pianist. You're an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I'm away. You're patient. You're generous. You're the best listener I know. You're the smartest person I know, in every way. You're the bravest person I know, in every way. You're a lawyer. You're the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it. You're a mathematician. You're a logician. You've tried to teach me, again and again. You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you."

"And who are you?"
"I'm Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Sometimes it's because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel," he began, and glanced at me before looking down again. "And sometimes it's because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all - it helps clear them away. And sometimes it's because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn't. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant. Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn't so bad after all, and felt better. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He was no good for them, anyway; he was only an extravagant collection of problems, nothing more. Unless he stopped himself, he would consume them with his needs. He would take and take and take from them until he had chewed away their every bit of flesh; they could answer every difficulty he posed to them and he would still find new ways to destroy them. For a while, they would mourn him, because they were good people, the best, and he was sorry for that - but eventually they would see that their lives were better without him in it. They would see how much time he had stolen from them; they would understand what a thief he had been, how he had suckled away all their energy and attention, how he had exsanguinated them. He hoped they would forgive him; he hoped they would see that this was his apology to them. He was releasing them - he loved them most of all, and this was what you did for people you loved: you gave them their freedom. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Much of his friendship with Jude, it often seemed, was not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
pg 674 "let me get better or let me end it ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something - some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming's death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn't care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
I didn't like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He is sitting by the pool and talking to Harold and Julia when abruptly, he feels that strange hollowing in his stomach he occasionally experiences even when he and Jude are in the same house: the sensation of missing him, and odd desire to see him. And although he would never say it to him, this is the way Jude reminds him of Hemming - that awareness that sometimes touches him, as lightly as wings, that the people he loves are more temporal, somehow, than others, that he has borrowed them, and that someday they will be reclaimed from him. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Weak he was, how pathetic! - allowed himself to be warmed by this comment, ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
clearly besotted with ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He never mentioned whether something was fair, however. Fairness itself seemed to hold very little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what's fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields ... Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He stared at me for a long time with that look he had – I know you know the one – where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges being cranked above the moat. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He feels he isn't so much living as he is merely existing, ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? 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? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. 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 ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life - all of our lives - as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Or drive up to his parents' house, one of you plugging into the car's stereo an outlandish playlist, with which you would both sing along, loudly, being extravagantly silly as adults the way you never were as children. As you got older, you realize that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. I ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
Having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by 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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. I was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

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. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
The easiest explanations are often the right ones, ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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
Hanya Yanagihara quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
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