A Little Life Quotes

“But she was right about one thing: it did get harder and harder. He did blame himself. 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, A Little Life

“Don't try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He would have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp that was really more of a glide and to have the face and body that he did.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“They’re silent. ‘So basically,’ Jude says at last, ‘basically, you’re saying I’m New Zealand.’
It takes him a second to realize Jude is joking, and when he does he begins to laugh, unhingedly, with relief and sorrow, and he turns Jude toward him and kisses him. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, you’re New Zealand.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And finally, you need to know that people will keep their agreements, that they will honor their promises: and that is contracts.” He paused. “Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won’t, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“My sweetheart” Harold says again, and he wants him to stop; he wants him to never stop. “My baby.” And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tenderness, of fondness, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last of believing a parents’ reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I don't know," he said, miserably. It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn't have the energy to try.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“De modo que intento ser amable con todo lo que veo y en todo lo que veo lo veo a él”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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? Talk to me, he sometimes wanted to shout at Jude. Tell me things. Tell me what I need to do to make you talk to me.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“stepping out into the world in which no one knew him, and in which he could be anyone.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He opens his eyes and experiences that strange, lovely sensation he sometimes has, the one in which he realizes that his life is cloudless.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life