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But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music -- Hanya Yanagihara
The beauty of a Moroccan riad is undeniable, but even the most die-hard fan may find herself growing a little weary of what can come to feel like a one-size-fits-all aesthetic: tilework, white Berber rugs, woolen tribal throw pillows in reds and ochers, cut-metal lanterns. -- Hanya Yanagihara
To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he'd had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him -- Hanya Yanagihara
...the only trick with friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are - not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving - and then appreciate them for what they can teach you... -- Hanya Yanagihara
Their world is governed by children, little despots whose needs - school and camp and activities and tutors - dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen years[...] Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I have only a few really enviable skills, but packing - condensing just the right amount of stuff into a single bag, whether the trip is for a weekend or, as in this case, seven weeks - is one of them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person. -- Hanya Yanagihara
flibbertigibbets - and -- Hanya Yanagihara
Poor Fa'a, I said, although my answer was more reflexive than anything else. He was a good, kind person, and although I thought he was being melodramatic, I appreciated his compassion. In the absence of action, Poor Fa'a seemed to be the only thing to say. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think there are patterns of the aftermath of colonization that you see echoed in cultures and communities across the world. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Opposite Willem that afternoon is a Thom Gunn poem: "Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed." Underneath, someone has written in black market, "Dont worry man I cant get no pussy either. -- Hanya Yanagihara
In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. More troubling to him than his -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
I have become lost to the world," he sings, quietly, "in which I otherwise wasted so much time. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He longed for that year right after the injury, before he met Andy, when it seemed that everything might be improved upon, and that his future self might be something bright and clean, when he knew so little but had such hope, and faith that his hope might one day be rewarded. -- Hanya Yanagihara
We think of writing a book as a process, but the very word - process - suggests that there is one: a template to follow, a map to guide us. If that were true, someone would have surely figured out some marketable method we could all buy. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face - I still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you, and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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, and I think I make them happy. -- Hanya Yanagihara
They ate dishes of orange rounds floating in a liqueur of their own juice and topped with cinnamon and pulverized cloves and almonds, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life. -- Hanya Yanagihara
clearly besotted with -- Hanya Yanagihara
The question was how you ignored someone's request to be left alone - even if it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won't be helped while realizing that if you don't try to help, then you're not being a friend at all? -- Hanya Yanagihara
The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. -- Hanya Yanagihara
We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there. -- Hanya Yanagihara
When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think at first I didn't tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Flora had not seemed to mind the excessive amount of time their parents demanded from them, which had meant that he could spend more time in his room working on his model houses and less time downstairs in the den, fidgeting through one of his father's interminable Ozu film festivals. -- Hanya Yanagihara
This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
Won't bother you, and you'll be safe here. You think you can manage grace at the table for a little privacy and guaranteed security?" She looked at him and smiled. He nodded. "Besides," she continued, "you can always call me if you want to talk sin. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself - his very life - has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. -- Hanya Yanagihara
None of them really wanted to listen to someone else's story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own. -- Hanya Yanagihara
In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law - although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember. -- Hanya Yanagihara
We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see. -- Hanya Yanagihara
S if lack of privilege were a competition that he was still determined to win, even in the face of another's clear and inarguable triumph. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Much of his friendship with Jude, it often seemed, was not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I know how you feel, Willem," Andy had said in one of their secret conversations, "but he doesn't want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted so much time
It means nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime's worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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 everyday. For a brief period - briefer and briefer with each week - the world was splendid and unknown. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I was interested about how relationships change as you get older. You are great friends in your 20s. In your 30s, you get married. Your 40s are all about your kids. In your 50s, you get divorced, and your friendships become primary again. -- Hanya Yanagihara
And although [he] posed each as a discrete quandary, he knew that in reality each one was inseparable from the last, and that if it had been grammatically and linguistically possible to ask all of them together in one big question, then that would be the truest expression of why he was where he was. -- Hanya Yanagihara
There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Pg 679 and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title;
WILLEM LISTENING TO JUDE TELL A STORY, GREENE STREET
... and he feels his breath abandon him -- Hanya Yanagihara
Now was not the time to get ensnared in something new and complicated, and he didn't really have the energy for a one-night hookup which, he knew, had a funny way of becoming as exhausting as something longer-term. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I wanted to see how flavors, spices, and grains traveled back and forth along the Silk Road and were interpreted by a multitude of cultures' palates. -- Hanya Yanagihara
One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Harold, Julia - are you kidding? There's nothing - nothing - I've ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought - He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew. -- Hanya Yanagihara
After. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire ... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory. -- Hanya Yanagihara
One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The ocean, its remorseless, lonely conversation with itself -- Hanya Yanagihara
After he had resolved this, he felt the fatigue overwhelm him, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I was so busy building my life only to wake and discover it was over -- Hanya Yanagihara
his privacy, his life, is still his -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever. -- Hanya Yanagihara
his family was happy when he was happy, and so his only obligation to them was to be happy, to live exactly the life he wanted, on the terms he wanted. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Publishing is a business, and I completely understand it. But when you don't have to depend on writing for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The term 'pashmina' is often used interchangeably with 'cashmere,' but in reality, pashmina is a specific type of very fine, lofty cashmere, woven from a specific type of goat - one indigenous to northern India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and harvested and woven there as well. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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 rarely true. -- Hanya Yanagihara
And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? -- Hanya Yanagihara
I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Jude seemed so confident, so competent, so certain that he, too, had something to offer. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Without them, one's status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself , and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity -- Hanya Yanagihara
Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow. -- Hanya Yanagihara
We're all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn't mean they weren't happy years, that it wasn't a happy life. He -- Hanya Yanagihara
Pg 621 We are all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn't mean they weren't happy years, that it wasn't a happy life -- Hanya Yanagihara
Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Gods are for stories and heavens and other realms; they are not to be seen by men. But when we encroach on their world, when we see what we are not meant to see, how can anything but disaster follow? -- Hanya Yanagihara
Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero. -- Hanya Yanagihara
When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids. -- Hanya Yanagihara
This wasn't the version of himself he wanted to paint. But increasingly, he had begun to think this was the version of himself he should paint: this was, after all, his life. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them. I -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What is life for? he asks himself. What is my life for? -- Hanya Yanagihara
Sometimes he found himself resenting the others' definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it: -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
Oh god, I thought, can nothing in this jungle behave as it ought? Must fruits move and trees breathe and freshwater rivers taste of the ocean? Why must nothing obey the laws of nature? Why must everything point so heavily toward the existence of enchantment? -- Hanya Yanagihara
Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be." At -- Hanya Yanagihara
pain that would extend down his spine into one leg or the other, like a wooden stake set aflame and thrust into him: -- Hanya Yanagihara
I was born in L.A., then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to New York, then we moved to Baltimore, then we moved to California, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to Texas, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to California. This was before I was 17. -- Hanya Yanagihara
To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people's words! - it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
Sometimes, of course, there's no quick way to make it through immigration: Different airports have gluts of incoming flights at different times of day, and short of rearranging your flight schedule to ensure you'll land at a low-traffic hour, there's nothing you can do. -- Hanya Yanagihara
And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him. -- Hanya Yanagihara
You understood that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier. -- Hanya Yanagihara
In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He wonders whether this very idea of loneliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, -- Hanya Yanagihara
I have never wanted a family. I don't believe in marriage, though I obviously believe it should be legal for everyone who wants to do it. But it is not something I believe in, nor do the characters in my book, nor do any of my friends. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged. -- Hanya Yanagihara
There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him -- Hanya Yanagihara
He sometimes wished he had a mind like JB's, one that could create stories that would delight others, instead of the mind he did have, which was always searching for an explanation, an explanation that, while perhaps correct, was empty of romance, of fancy, of wit. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Fucking with one's therapist - even if one's therapist truly deserved to be fucked with - was the sort of thing you did when you were nineteen, not when you were thirty-nine. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I don't believe in post-racial or post-gay or post-anything, but I do think within a certain group of friends, what matters less is the specificities of race and sexuality, and what matters more is the shared experience, shared language and shared cultural touch points. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It had been a useful skill, this persistent and unshatterable somnambulism, and it had protected him, but then that ability, like his ability to forget, -- Hanya Yanagihara
I love how Vietnamese cuisine always tastes like flowers, and how they had the ingenious idea of pairing that floral flavor with seafood: such a combination shouldn't work as well as it does. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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, to think he has the right to keep going when even his own body tells him he should stop. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think I passed up a lot of opportunities for love because I was too interested in identity politics. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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 passersby or dump powder, all violently hued, on their marks. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Pg 619 If he had been left to choose rather than forced to learn -- Hanya Yanagihara
We are so old, we have become young again. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn't have the energy to try. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of lonliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, that there is something strange and unnacceptable about the life he has. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. He -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Willem had tried to approach the subject through various directions - through stories of friends and acquaintances, some named, some not (he had to assume some of these people were creations, as surely no one person could have such a vast collection of sexually abused friends). -- Hanya Yanagihara
sometimes decided to be truculent and unyielding, like a grouchy toddler - -- Hanya Yanagihara
His poor-man's Ionesconian exchanges with Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework, at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? -- Hanya Yanagihara
I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example. -- Hanya Yanagihara
His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling - as he often did - as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama. -- Hanya Yanagihara
but he had seen lots of women behave this way around Willem. They all had. Their friend Lionel used to say that Willem must have been a fisherman in a past life, because he couldn't help but attract pussy. -- Hanya Yanagihara
You made art because it was the only thing you'd ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and -- Hanya Yanagihara
Does he seem listless, out of sorts? -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
On and on and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor: blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery. -- Hanya Yanagihara
So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they'd told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude's father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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 so much more entertaining then. What had happened? -- Hanya Yanagihara
Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he'd found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn't known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life. -- Hanya Yanagihara
And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don't often do well in law school, but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had been worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a life that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read about in books. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have to be two distinct realms, but he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere. -- Hanya Yanagihara
When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop? -- Hanya Yanagihara
How although they'd of course been warned that their lives would be misery for years, how they had all of them, to a one, assumed they'd be the exception (and now all, to a one, secretly thought they still would be). -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I would rather have you suffering and alive-than dead. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. But it was only for comedy, or to make other people feel young. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It was like any relationship, he felt - it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn't it wither? -- Hanya Yanagihara
his memories from this period were something slightly blur-edged and unreliable, -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
Severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it. -- Hanya Yanagihara
lunches at which everyone segregated themselves by rank and caste - -- Hanya Yanagihara
I didn't like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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: -- Hanya Yanagihara
you have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don't even apply to you. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He feels he isn't so much living as he is merely existing, -- Hanya Yanagihara
That's your dad talking, Mal. Your life won't be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don't have kids. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969. -- Hanya Yanagihara
You will learn to see your life - all of our lives - as a series of agreements, -- Hanya Yanagihara
They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion). -- Hanya Yanagihara
They all - Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors - sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days. -- Hanya Yanagihara
And yet he wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. -- Hanya Yanagihara
They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves. -- Hanya Yanagihara
That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The sound here was of no sound, of a place holding its breath, an edgy, bitten-back quiet, as if it would at once explode with the color and noise of a great party. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? -- Hanya Yanagihara
He was trying to accept that there were certain things that would never conform to his idea of how life should be, no matter how intensely he hoped or pretended they might. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Poor house! I thought, and at moments I would find myself stroking one of its whitepainted doorframes as if I were petting a horse's nose: gently, slowly, trying to soothe it back to calmness. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting - and then, in an instant, it is over, -- Hanya Yanagihara
An elegant mind wants elegant endings -- Hanya Yanagihara
People so entitled, so certain they won't be caught that being caught - that very concern - doesn't even occur to them. People who think the laws are written for people who make less than nine figures a year. People who think the laws are applicable only by race, or by tax bracket." He -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
You're not just my weird patient, Jude", Andy said. "You're also my weird friend." He paused. "Or at least, I hope you are." He smiled into the phone. "Of course I am," he said. "I'm honored to be your weird friend. -- Hanya Yanagihara
garish displays of wealth, -- Hanya Yanagihara
He can't live once more through those fifteen years, those fifteen years whose half-life have been so long and so resonant, that have determined everything he had become and done. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It means nothing to me / Whether the world believes me dead / I can hardly say anything to refute it / For truly, I am no longer a part of the world. When -- Hanya Yanagihara
To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else. -- Hanya Yanagihara
An admission of extreme otherness, -- Hanya Yanagihara
pg 674 "let me get better or let me end it -- Hanya Yanagihara
Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
Right and wrong, however, are for - well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I was raised Catholic," he began. "But you're not now?" the judge asked, frowning. "No," he said. He had worked for years to keep the apology out of his voice when he said this. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Jaipur, like Florence or Kyoto, other artisan-rich cities to which it roughly compares, has always been known for its craftsmanship. -- Hanya Yanagihara
We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Pg 685 And so home he goes, and he waits and waits for Willem to appear to him. But he doesn't, and finally he sleeps. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Felt for a minute frightened by the jungle, its voracious appetite and ambition, its hunger to consume every surface it encountered. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I have never found it difficult, as some do, to speak to children. All one has to do is pretend that they're some kind of intelligent farm animal: a pig, perhaps, or a horse. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he sacrificed it. -- Hanya Yanagihara
There is something uniquely American about the motel: It speaks to the transient nature of America itself, one enabled and encouraged by our roads and highways. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Fair is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration. -- Hanya Yanagihara
My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Thought of drugs the way he thought of desserts, which he also loved: a consumable that had been forbidden to him as a child and which was now freely available. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable. -- Hanya Yanagihara
This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? -- Hanya Yanagihara
That night, once he was alone, he cried as well: not because of what he had done but because he hadn't been successful, because he had lived after all. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The easiest explanations are often the right ones, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Once you join the queue for the immigration line, pay attention to what the expeditor tells you. Have your papers ready. Don't have your cell phone out. Take off your hat. Open your passport to the page with your photo and present it to the immigration officer already open. -- Hanya Yanagihara
converted, how the remaining villagers on Ivu'ivu, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Now he looked at couples - in restaurants, on the street, at parties - and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What's missing in you that you want someone else to provide? -- Hanya Yanagihara
In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents. -- Hanya Yanagihara
his parents huffing after him; -- Hanya Yanagihara
Of course, no one has enough time to see every shop that Mumbai has: That would take more lifetimes than even the gods could offer. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault. -- Hanya Yanagihara
he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn't even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, -- Hanya Yanagihara
If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. AMY: -- Hanya Yanagihara
All the movies with young people were about wanting sex; all the movies with old people were about wanting sex. He would watch these films and feel defeated. When did you get to stop wanting to have sex? -- Hanya Yanagihara
When he had promised himself that he wouldn't try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What's your favorite axiom? (The nerd pickup line, -- Hanya Yanagihara
I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others. -- Hanya Yanagihara
There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't. -- Hanya Yanagihara
But you need someone who can grow old with you. -- Hanya Yanagihara
And although he tried every day to remember the promise he'd made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he'd read long ago. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I was aware that I had been looking for him on every street, in every crowd. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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
Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. -- Hanya Yanagihara
An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they'd ever read. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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 -- Hanya Yanagihara
The original Grand Tour would generally begin in Belgium or the Netherlands before moving through Paris, Geneva, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Greece. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop. -- Hanya Yanagihara
You'll find your own way to discuss what happened to you. You'll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone. But your life - no matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it has been your fault. Will you remember that? -- Hanya Yanagihara
The thought of seeing Malcolm and JB, of interacting with them and smiling and joking, seemed suddenly excruciating. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Yeah, I know you think I'm a fucking moron, but I can figure it out if you only use small words, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Everything he has learned tells him to leave; Everything he has wished for tells him to stay. -- Hanya Yanagihara
In those months I thought often of what I was trying to do, of how hard it is to keep alive someone who doesn't want to stay alive.
That was what I thought: that I would rather have him suffering and alive - than dead. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Weak he was, how pathetic! - allowed himself to be warmed by this comment, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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? -- Hanya Yanagihara
But what in life wasn't connected to some greater, sadder story? -- Hanya Yanagihara
I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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? -- Hanya Yanagihara
How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all? -- Hanya Yanagihara
From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The world has two kinds of people," Judge Sullivan used to say. "Those who are inclined to believe, and those who aren't. In my courtroom, we value belief. Belief in all things." He -- Hanya Yanagihara
You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I don't think the reader needs protecting. If you guide the reader steadily, they'll follow you. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them all. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world's pleasures? And -- Hanya Yanagihara
Valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right -- Hanya Yanagihara
One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes. -- Hanya Yanagihara
A period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; -- Hanya Yanagihara
His dithering seemed silly. He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him - he trusted himself with that much. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; -- Hanya Yanagihara
In that moment his sadness was so great, so overpowering, that he wanted to tear at himself, to rip the scar from the back of his hand, to shred himself into bits as he had done to Luke's flowers. But -- Hanya Yanagihara
If the only thing you knew about Oman was its location, you might never go at all. -- Hanya Yanagihara
In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Hong Kong has plenty of superlative hotels, amazing food, and cool shopping. -- Hanya Yanagihara
James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart. -- Hanya Yanagihara
my father said the whole world seemed made of sound and nothing else. -- Hanya Yanagihara
All the most terrifying ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well. -- Hanya Yanagihara
They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I didn't intend the book as anything therapeutic and I don't think that's a novel's goal or responsibility. -- Hanya Yanagihara
He had been able to convince himself that he was someone else, someone happier, someone freer and braver. But now Willem is gone, and he is again who he was twenty, thirty, forty years ago. -- Hanya Yanagihara
I should have left him, thought. It was never my place to try to save something that no one else had wanted. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Blithe; he seething - until they had left the restaurant and started -- Hanya Yanagihara
If your body was well, you expected it to perform for you, excellently, consistently. If your body was not, your expectations were different. -- Hanya Yanagihara
It had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence. -- Hanya Yanagihara
The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Video, ergo est," said Laurence, suddenly. I see it, therefore it is. -- Hanya Yanagihara
We don't get the families we deserve, -- Hanya Yanagihara
He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved. -- Hanya Yanagihara
What I loved most was their scent, one that mingled sweetness and decay at once -- Hanya Yanagihara
him - I was always happy to play the fool if I thought it might give him some pleasure - -- Hanya Yanagihara
He liked to pretend he was one of them, but he knew he was not. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
he feels his breath abandon him; -- Hanya Yanagihara
He would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving person. -- Hanya Yanagihara
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. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Don't let this silence become a habit, -- Hanya Yanagihara
Experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved -- Hanya Yanagihara
