Quotes by Hanya Yanagihara

All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esmes reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.

He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willems heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. Harder, Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richards family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and Indias apartment, and Richards studio, and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossil and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earths core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they arent burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.

He didnt 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 stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldnt see them without aching for them.

I didn’t intend the book as anything therapeutic and I dont think that’s a novel’s 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. Even Malcolms money wouldnt immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. 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.

...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, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents house, where the porch light washed the night with honey.

Thank god he wasnt a writer, or hed 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.

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.

He wasnt 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.

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.

...when your child dies, you feel everything youd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I wont even bother to list them here, except to say that everything thats written about mourning is all the same, and its all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.But heres what no one says - when its your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.Ah, you tell yourself, its arrived. Here it is.And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadnt happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated werent necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience Id had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if Id somehow become possessed by it.

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.

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.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldnt 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?

I don’t really think of myself as gay, though,” he began, and Kit rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so naïve, Willem,” he said. “Once you’ve touched a dick, you’re gay.

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

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.