He wasn't 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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

— Hanya Yanagihara

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescent, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

— Hanya Yanagihara

I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your 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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

I didn’t intend the book as anything therapeutic, and I don't think that’s a novel’s goal or responsibility.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life--which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling--was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge, but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.

— Hanya Yanagihara

I have never wanted a family. I don't believe in marriage, though I obviously believe it should be legal for everyone who wants to do it. But it is not something I believe in, nor do the characters in my book, nor do any of my friends.

— Hanya Yanagihara