Hanya Yanagihara quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Hanya Yanagihara on Wise Famous Quotes.

Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit.

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.

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

Harold," he says, although Andy is still talking, "release me. Release me from my promise to you. Don't make me do this anymore. Don't make me go on.

Again. Was it better to trust or better to be wary? Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?

An elegant mind wants elegant endings

my father said the whole world seemed made of sound and nothing else.

It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. I

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

I think there are patterns of the aftermath of colonization that you see echoed in cultures and communities across the world.

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.

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.

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

I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends.

The ocean, its remorseless, lonely conversation with itself

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

I was aware that I had been looking for him on every street, in every crowd.

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.

I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him.

What is life for? he asks himself. What is my life for?

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

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

I would rather have you suffering and alive-than dead.

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.

Does he seem listless, out of sorts?

It is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind.

To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.

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

He will be reminded of how trapped he is, trapped in a body he hates, with a past he hates, and how he will never be able to change either.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

clearly besotted with

Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him to want, never occurred to him he might have:

An admission of extreme otherness,

Those of us lucky enough to fall in love with Asia know that it's an affair that's as long as it is resonant.

We don't get the families we deserve,

pain that would extend down his spine into one leg or the other, like a wooden stake set aflame and thrust into him:

Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.

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

Hong Kong has plenty of superlative hotels, amazing food, and cool shopping.

Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be." At

He has tasted anger, and he knows he has to control it. He can feel it, waiting to burst from his mouth in a swarm of stinging black flies.

What point?" Malcolm had asked. "That you can be as annoying to white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?

converted, how the remaining villagers on Ivu'ivu,

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

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

I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.

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

If your body was well, you expected it to perform for you, excellently, consistently. If your body was not, your expectations were different.

You will learn to see your life - all of our lives - as a series of agreements,

I was so busy building my life only to wake and discover it was over

What I loved most was their scent, one that mingled sweetness and decay at once

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.

When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids.

It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn't have the energy to try.

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.

Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.

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

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.

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

He had simply let his life be dictated to him by others, following one man after the next, the way he had been taught to do.

We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.

Jude seemed so confident, so competent, so certain that he, too, had something to offer.

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

How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all?

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.

his parents huffing after him;

flibbertigibbets - and

Everything he has learned tells him to leave; Everything he has wished for tells him to stay.

But if you act like you don't belong, if you act like you're apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too.

The original Grand Tour would generally begin in Belgium or the Netherlands before moving through Paris, Geneva, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Greece.

Gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold.

I think I passed up a lot of opportunities for love because I was too interested in identity politics.

None of them really wanted to listen to someone else's story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.

Oh, he thinks, if I were a better person. If I were a more generous person. If I were a less self-involved person. If I were a braver person.

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

his memories from this period were something slightly blur-edged and unreliable,

I think at first I didn't tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did.

Video, ergo est," said Laurence, suddenly. I see it, therefore it is.

It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.

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.

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?

Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult.

He feels he isn't so much living as he is merely existing,

He liked to pretend he was one of them, but he knew he was not.

Felt for a minute frightened by the jungle, its voracious appetite and ambition, its hunger to consume every surface it encountered.

Sometimes he found himself resenting the others' definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it:

This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants.

But what in life wasn't connected to some greater, sadder story?

So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.

he feels his breath abandon him;

garish displays of wealth,

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.

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

The awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable.

his privacy, his life, is still his

The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty.

He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories;

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