Hanya Yanagihara 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

“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

“I have become lost to the world / In which i otherwise wasted so much time.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn't know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.”
― 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

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He had wanted to vanish, then, to close his eyes and reel back time, back to before he had ever met Caleb. He would have turned down Rhodes's invitation; he would have kept living his little life; he would never have known the difference.”
― 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

“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.”
― 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

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

“. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He has just come home, so exhausted that he feels soluble, as if he is evaporating into the air, so insubstantial that he feels not made of blood and bone but of vapor and fog, when he sees Willem standing before him. He opens his mouth to speak to him, but then he blinks and Willem is gone, and he is teetering, his arms stretched before him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“. . .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, 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

“Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so about how they might get immortalized," she said. "The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized," she said. "The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise