A Little Life Quotes

“But then, once you agree, it is necessary that you, the cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don't want to be here, you can see that the act of existing is depleting for them, and then you have to tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“The question is which one of us is the frog and which is the toad,' Willem had said after they'd first seen the show, in JB's studio, and read the kindhearted books to each other late that night, laughing helplessly as they did.

He'd smiled; they had been lying in bed. 'Obviously, I'm the toad,' he said.

'No,' Willem said, 'I think you're the frog; your eyes are the same color as his skin.'

Willem sounded so serious that he grinned. 'That's your evidence?' he asked. 'And so what do you have in common with the toad?'

'I think I actually have a jacket like the one he has,' Willem said, and they began laughing again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes 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, that there is something strange and unacceptable about the life he has. 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 . . . Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feels sorry for him because they assume singledom is not his decision but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that his singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes it's because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel...and sometimes it's because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all--it helps clear them away. And sometimes it's because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn't.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“The easiest explanations are often the right ones,”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I am guilty of many things when it comes to him. But sometimes, illogically, I feel guiltiest for this. I opened the van door, I invited him inside. And while I didn't drive off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be; even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he would become. But his friends, Ana, Lucien, Harold and Julia: They had imagined his life for him. They had seen him as something different than he had ever seen himself as; they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived. He saw his life as the axiom of equality, but they saw it as another riddle, one with no name—Jude = x—and they had filled in the x in ways Brother Luke, the counselors at the home, Dr. Traylor had never written for him or encouraged him to write for himself. He wishes he could believe their proofs the way they do; he wishes they had shown him how they had arrived at their solutions.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes I felt that there was something physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And then I went to college, and I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me - everything, really. They made me, and make me, into someone better than I really am...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 his the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: 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, A Little Life

“I was so busy building my life only to wake and discover it was over”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life

“Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It's often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most difficult time in their first year -- law school, particularly the first year of law school, is not really a place where creativity, abstract thought, and imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think -- based on what I've heard, not what I know firsthand -- that it's a bit like art school.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives—truly tell their lives—to one person?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield. And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours. The second thing is this: 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 written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real 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 here’s what no one says—when it’s 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, it’s arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Later, I admired her: I admired how rapidly, how fluidly, she was adjusting to the fact that the child she thought she would have was not the child she did have. I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in our name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all - and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him. For the rest of Jacob's life, I lagged one step behind Liesl: I kept dreaming he would get better, that he would return to what he had been; she, however, thought only about the life he could have given the current realities of his situation. Maybe he could go to a special school. Okay, he couldn't go to a school at all, but maybe he could be in a playgroup. Okay, he wouldn't be able to be in a playgroup, but maybe he would be able to live a long life anyway. Okay, he wouldn't live a long life, but maybe he could live a short happy life. Okay, he couldn't live a short happy life, but maybe he could live a short life with dignity: we could give him that, and she would hope for nothing else for him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But then the feeling would dissipate, and 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, 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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Something about the fall, the freshness of the pain, had been restorative. It was honest pain, clear pain, a pain without shame or filth, and it was a different sensation than he had felt in years...before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was tossing himself against the brick wall, and as he did so, he imagined he was knocking out of himself every piece of dirt, every trace of liquid, every memory of the past few years. He was resetting himself; he was returning himself to something pure; he was punishing himself for what he had done. After that, he felt better, energized.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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, A Little Life