Quotes by Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

“He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem's heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and hi...”

“He didn't really care if they 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 strea...”

“I know my life's meaningful because" - and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued - " because I'm a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, ...”

“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.”

“I didnt intend the book as anything therapeutic and I don't think thats a novels goal or responsibility.”

“What does Malcolm have to worry about?" JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. ...”

“...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, wher...”

“He wasn't so elderly after all, I saw: probably just a few years older than I. And yet I was never able (and am still not) to think of myself as old. I talked as if I knew I was; I bemoaned my age....”

“He will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and most wretched moments, the one that asks him who he thinks he is to inconvenience so many people, ...”

“...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's wri...”

“Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn't happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you sle...”

“It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'...”

“The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is rar...”

“And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyda...”

“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 ...”

“I dont really think of myself as gay, though, he began, and Kit rolled his eyes. Dont be so nave, Willem, he said. Once youve touched a dick, youre gay.”

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

“No religion makes more use of color than Hinduism, with its blue-skinned gods and peony-lipped goddesses, and even the spring festival of Holi is focused on color: Boys squirt arcs of dyed water on...”