1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara photo

Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

Total quotes: 22
“Please tell me you forgive me. I was so awful. I love you, you know that. I would never want to hurt you, never.”
— JB, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: forgiveness, Forgive Me, Don't Want To Hurt You, Please Forgive Me
“I love you more than I love my own self.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: I Love You More, I Love You More Quotes, How To Say I Love You
“He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Tagged: Loneliness, Life, Being Alone
“Friendship is the most underrated relationship in our lives. It remains the one relation not bound by law, blood, or money — but an unspoken agreement of love.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, Relying on Friendship in a World Made for Couples
Tagged: Friendship, The Ways We Love
“New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Ambition, New York City
“When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Brave, Fool, Stop
“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Can We Even Begin To Articulate?, Finding The Right Words, Happiness, Searching For Joy, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“And he thinks he begins to cry, but he is unable to produce tears. Everything has gone so wrong, he thinks; how did everything go so wrong?”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Tears, Crying, So Wrong, Life Over, True Sorrow, Weeping
“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.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Childern, Having Kids, Parenthood
“The person I am will always be the person I am, I realize. The context may have changed… But fundamentally, I'm the same person.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: The Axiom Of Equality, X = X, Impossible Progress, Cynicism, Fatalism
“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Fairness
“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better?”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Tagged: Friendship, Relationships
“How might things have been different if he spoke only one sentence?”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Destiny, Finding The Right Words, In Retrospect, Looking Back, The Course of Change, Words As Destiny Drivers
“Days were defined, glossed, by a certain tonal consistency.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Soothing Language, How Days Operate, Tones of Life
“He understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Anxiety, anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like
“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Tagged: Friendship
“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Friendship, Friends, Friendship vs. Realtionships, Resist
“I would walk through campus and overhear conversations — someone talking about splitting up with her boyfriend, someone talking about a bad grade he got on a test, someone talking about his sprained ankle — and would feel rage. You stupid, petty, selfish, self-absorbed people, I wanted to say. You hateful people, I hate you. Your problems aren't problems.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: People Are Vanishing
“Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Relationships
“Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice.


Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores. 


This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him. 


It will end badly, says the first voice, and then both voices fall silent, waiting to see what he will do. He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know what will happen. He has to find out. Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself. Be brave for once.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Lonely, Self-Doubt, Meeting Someone New, Dating, It Will End Badly, Hanya's Equality
“But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils. There was a period — or at least you hoped there was — with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Second Vision, The Passion, The Vision Behind Vision, Artist
“Since then, he has tried to tell Willem more things. But there are so many topics that he has never discussed with anyone since Ana, now twenty-five years ago, that he finds he literally doesn't have the language to do so. His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself — they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn't speak: Farsi, Urdu, Mandarin, Portuguese. Once, he tried to write some things down, thinking that it might be easier, but it wasn't— he is unclear how to explain himself to himself.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Inner Distances, The Difficulty Of Communication, Trauma
loading next page...