Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

We are so old, we have become young again.

Right and wrong, however, are for – well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.

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.

There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.

All the most terrifying ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.

You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of 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 to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.

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

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

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.

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.

There’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.[Harold says to Jude]

Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things 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 those things.