Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

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

Kashmir, the 86, 000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.

He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.

Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.

he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong

He placed his hand on Willem's arm. 'Willem, don't cry.''I'm not going to, ' he said. 'I can do other things in life besides cry, you know, ' although he was no longer sure that was even true.

. . .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.

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.

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

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.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.

I didn’t intend the book as anything therapeutic and I don't think that’s a novel’s goal or responsibility.

All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.

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.

It's a good story, ' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.''Please, ' I said.And then he did.

My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

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

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.

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

. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.