Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life Quotes
He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.
Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.
he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong
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.
. . .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.
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.
He would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving person.
It was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others.
That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.
He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.
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.
It's a good story, ' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.''Please, ' I said.And then he did.
My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.
He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.
And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
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.
There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return
. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.
What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.