He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt the same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it beenn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in these moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

— Hanya Yanagihara

He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem's heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. 'Harder,' Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard's family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and India's apartment, and Richard's studio, and then to the first floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossil and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earth's core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren't burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.

— Hanya Yanagihara

He joined Jude in the kitchen and began making a salad, and JB slumped to the dining-room table and started flipping through a novel Jude had left there. "I read this," he called over to him. "Do you want to know what happens in the end?" "No, JB," said Jude. "I'm only halfway through."" The minister character dies after all.""JB!" After that, JB's mood seemed to improve.

— Hanya Yanagihara

...he lacked the sort of ambition that JB and Jude had, that grim, trudging determination that kept them at the studio or office longer than anyone else, that gave them that slightly faraway look in their eyes that always made him think a fraction of them was already living in some imagined future, the contours of which were crystallized only to them.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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

Here, however, you made art because it was the only thing you've ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils.

— Hanya Yanagihara

He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.

— Hanya Yanagihara

He tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong

— Hanya Yanagihara