A Little Life Quotes

“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, A Little Life

“He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I was aware that I had been looking for him on every street, in every crowd.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“We are so old, we have become young again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.'

'Please,' I said.

And then he did.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).

I don't think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn't want to eat.

But it's for you, Willem.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“To me, the thing about friendship that makes it so singular is that it’s a relationship that’s central to our identity in that it doesn’t necessarily benefit us in any tangible way. It’s a relationship we don’t have to pursue – if we decide to stop being friends one day, nothing will happen, no one’s there to legislate or adjudicate it. It’s two people who every day choose to keep it going, and in that way it’s very powerful because it’s one you choose to work on, and you choose to without any agreement; it’s an unspoken bond.”
― Hanya Yanagihara

“What is life for? he asks himself. What is my life for?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“When I looked at him, I understood, for the first time since Jacob died, what people meant when they said someone was heartbreaking, that something could break your heart. I had always thought it mawkish, but in that moment I realized that it might have been mawkish, but it was also true.

And that, I suppose, was when I knew.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“But then, once you agree, it is necessary that you, the cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don't want to be here, you can see that the act of existing is depleting for them, and then you have to tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“My poor Jude. My poor sweetheart. And with that he starts to cry. For nobody has called him sweetheart.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He doesn't know now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold's claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won't even be conscious that he's doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won't, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little 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, A Little Life

“I feel most bad most often for JB, deprived of you all, left to live the
beginnings of old age by himself, with new friends, certainly, but without
most of his friends who had known him since he was a child.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“For years, he couldn’t understand why this was so important to him, why it
mattered to him so much, why he was always trying to argue against his own
memories, to spend so much time debating the details of what had happened.
And then he realized that it was because he thought that if he could convince
himself that it was less awful than he remembered, then he could also
convince himself that he was less damaged, that he was closer to healthy, than
he feared he was.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Seu maior problema era que, quando trabalhava ao lado seus colegas à noite e o grupo se enfurnava em seus próprios sonhos e ambições, quando todos desenhavam e planejavam suas construções improváveis, ele ficava ali sem fazer nada. Perdera a capacidade de imaginar qualquer coisa. Assim, todas as noites, enquanto os outros criavam, ele copiava.

[...]

Sentia saudade dos anos em que bastava estar em seu quarto com a mão passando sobre a folha de papel quadriculado, antes dos anos de decisões e identidades, quando seus pais faziam as escolhas por ele, e a única coisa em que tinha que se concentrar era no traço limpo de uma linha, na perfeição da borda régua.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It’ll never be this bad,” Ana used to say to him in the hospital. “Things’ll never be this bad again,” and although he knew she meant the pain, he also liked to think she meant his life in general: that with every year, things would get better.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There is something very wrong with this
world, he thinks, a world in which of the four of them—him, JB, Willem, and
Malcolm—the two best people, the two kindest and most thoughtful, have
died, and the two poorer examples of humanity have survived.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There have been more texts from Andy as well, and from some
other people, and now he knows why, and he begins to cry: from everyone’s
kindness, which he has repaid so poorly, from his loneliness, from the proof
that life has, despite his efforts to let it, gone on after all.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Do you know how badly I could hurt you? he wants to ask Harold. Do you
know I could say things that you would never forget, that you would never
forgive me for? Do you know I have that power? Do you know that every day
I have known you I have been lying to you? Do you know what I really am?
Do you know how many men I have been with, what I have let them do to me,
the things that have been inside me, the noises I have made? His life, the only
thing that is his, is being possessed: By Harold, who wants to keep him alive,
by the demons who scrabble through his body, dangling off his ribs,
puncturing his lungs with their talons. By Brother Luke, by Dr. Traylor. What
is life for? he asks himself. What is my life for?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Si cuando lo conocí no podía imaginar lo que llegaría a ser para mí, ahora si sabía de que modo me dejaría: pese a todas mis esperanzas y ruegos, insinuaciones, amenazas y otras extravagancias, lo sabía. Y cinco meses después- el 12 de junio, una fecha poco significativa- lo hizo.


- Harold”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You’re dreaming of miracles, Willem,” Idriss would say if he knew what he was thinking, and he knew he was. But then again, he would think, what about his life—and about Jude’s life, too—wasn’t it a miracle? He should have stayed in Wyoming, he should have been a ranch hand himself. Jude should have wound up—where? In prison, or in a hospital, or dead, or worse. But they hadn’t. Wasn’t it a miracle that someone who was basically unexceptional could live a life in which he made millions pretending to be other people, that in that life that person would fly from city to city, would spend his days having his every need fulfilled, working in artificial contexts in which he was treated like the potentate of a small, corrupt country? Wasn’t it a miracle to be adopted at thirty, to find people who loved you so much that they wanted to call you their own? Wasn’t it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn’t this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle? And so who could blame him for hoping for one more, for hoping that despite knowing better, that despite biology, and time, and history, that they would be the exception, that what happened to other people with Jude’s sort of injury wouldn’t happen to him, that even with all that Jude had overcome, he might overcome just one more thing?”
― Hanya Yanagihara

“And so, as the years went by, he broke his
promises to himself again and again. He did end up following people who
were kind to him. He did trust people again. He did have sex again. He did
hope to be saved. And he was right to do so: not every time, of course, but
most of the time. He ignored what the past had taught him and more often
than he should have been, he was rewarded for it. He regretted none of it, not
even the sex, because he had had it with hope, and to make someone else.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But there is
something about Richard’s steadiness, his complete reliability, that—coupled
with his height, his very size—makes him think of him as some sort of
massive tree-god, an oak come into human form, something solid and ancient
and indestructible.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It would have been too melodramatic, too final, to say that after this JB was forever diminished for him. 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, A Little Life