241 Quotes by Hanya Yanagihara

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd 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.

but what in life wasn’t connected to some greater, sadder story?

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.

He has just come home, so exhausted that he feels soluble, as if he is evaporating into the air, so insubstantial that he feels not made of blood and bone but of vapor and fog, when he sees Willem standing before him. He opens his mouth to speak to him, but then he blinks and Willem is gone, and he is teetering, his arms stretched before him.

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.

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.

. . .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.

Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.