You Never Know How Much Your Friendship and Kindness Mean to a Young Person

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A Niggling Life by Hanya Yanagihara
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A Picayune Life Quotes Showing 1-30 of 1,216

"You won't empathise what I mean now, only someday you volition: the only trick of friendship, I remember, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not libation, simply kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to mind to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest matter of all. Just the all-time, as well."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you lot realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Why wasn't friendship every bit adept equally a relationship? Why wasn't it fifty-fifty better? It was 2 people who remained together, day later on mean solar day, bound not by sex or concrete allure or money or children or property, but merely by the shared understanding to keep going, the mutual dedication to a matrimony that could never exist codified."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Piffling Life

"And then I effort to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I run across, I see him."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the unabridged lonely world seem somehow less lonely?"
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"He experienced the singular pleasance of watching people he loved fall in dear with other people he loved."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Fiddling Life

"What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they fabricated things prettier."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Niggling Life

"Sometimes he wakes so far from himself that he can't even think who he is. "Where am I?" he asks, desperate, and so, "Who am I? Who am I?"
And then he hears, so close to his ear that it is as if the voice is originating within his own head, Willem'due south whispered incantation. "You're Jude St. Francis. Yous are my oldest, beloved friend. You're the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You're the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.
"You're a New Yorker. You lot live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts system; you lot volunteer for a food kitchen.
"You're a swimmer. You're a bakery. You're a cook. You're a reader. Y'all have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. Yous're an first-class pianist. Yous're an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I'chiliad away. Y'all're patient. Y'all're generous. You're the best listener I know. Y'all're the smartest person I know, in every way. You're the bravest person I know, in every mode.
"You're a lawyer. Yous're the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your task; you work hard at it.
"Y'all're a mathematician. You're a logician. You've tried to teach me, again and again.
"You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. Yous were always you."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Piddling Life

"Friendship was witnessing another's slow baste of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person'southward virtually dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Footling Life

"Who am I? Who am I?"
"You lot're Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You're the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You lot're the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs. You're a New Yorker. Yous alive in SoHo. Y'all volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a nutrient kitchen. You're a swimmer. You lot're a baker. You're a melt. You're a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you lot never sing anymore. You're an first-class pianist. Y'all're an art collector. You write me lovely letters when I'm away. Y'all're patient. You lot're generous. You're the all-time listener I know. Y'all're the smartest person I know, in every fashion. You lot're the bravest person I know, in every mode. You're a lawyer. You lot're the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. Yous love your chore; yous piece of work hard at it. Y'all're a mathematician. You're a logician. You lot've tried to teach me, over again and again. Yous were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you."

"And who are you?"
"I'one thousand Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to take lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
Correct and wrong, notwithstanding, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Petty Life

"None of them really wanted to listen to someone else's story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Picayune Life

"The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you accept a conceptual matter named ten, that information technology must e'er be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness well-nigh it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that nosotros must assume information technology is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that brand upwards the globe of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had in one case called information technology coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had e'er appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would ever exist frustrated by the attempts to prove information technology. It was the kind of axiom that could bulldoze you mad, that could swallow yous, that could easily get an entire life.

But at present he knows for sure how truthful the axiom is, because he himself––his very life––has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this flat, and he may have a chore that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Footling Life

"Merely what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly considering it was and so difficult to articulate?"
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"He had looked at Jude, so, and had felt that aforementioned sensation he sometimes did when he idea, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called information technology, just it wasn't a pitying sadness; information technology was a larger sadness, ane 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, fifty-fifty when their days were so very hard, even when their circumstances were and so wretched. Life is so distressing, he would recollect in those moments. It'south so distressing, and yet we all do it."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you lot want from a person - sexual chemical science, let'south say, or expert chat, or fiscal support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and y'all get to pick three of them."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"It is likewise then that I wish I believed in some sort of life subsequently life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where nosotros have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the temper like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to practise is open one's mouth and inhale in club to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or perhaps he is closer all the same: mayhap he is that gray cat that has begun to sit exterior our neighbor's house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; perhaps he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's ternion; mayhap he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing afterward him; maybe he is that bloom that of a sudden bloomed on the rhododendron bush I idea had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that moving ridge, that rain, that mist. Information technology isn't simply that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. Then I try to exist kind to everything I see, and in everything I run across, I run into him."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Harold sighs. "Jude," he says, "there'due south not an expiration appointment on needing help, or needing people. You don't go to a certain age and information technology stops."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Y'all see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don't demand to worry—they don't happen every bit often as they should. But when they practice, it's up to the practiced people to just say 'give thanks you,' and move on, and possibly consider that the person who's doing the nice matter gets a bang out of it besides, and really isn't in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he's done the dainty matter doesn't recollect he deserves information technology or isn't worthy of it."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"...when your child dies, y'all feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented past so many others that I won't fifty-fifty bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is still, and it'southward notwithstanding for a reason - because there is no read departure from the text. Sometimes y'all feel more of ane affair and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you experience them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are e'er the same.

But here'due south what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny only nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment yous have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the solar day you lot became a parent, has come up.

Ah, yous tell yourself, it'due south arrived. Here it is.

And afterwards that, you have nothing to fearfulness once again."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Information technology was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"I have never been one of those people—I know y'all aren't, either—who feels that the love ane has for a kid is somehow a superior love, one more than meaningful, more meaning, and grander than any other. I didn't feel that before Jacob, and I didn't feel that afterward. Just information technology is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is non physical allure, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. Yous have never known fright until you accept a child, and maybe that is what tricks u.s.a. into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fright itself is more than magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not "I dearest him" but "How is he?" The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle form of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cantankerous the street and would recall how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could wait to survive this life. Information technology seemed every bit improbable as the survival of i of those tardily-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, e'er just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted and so much time
Information technology ways nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I tin can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"He at present viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had called to value information technology also."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide y'all with some things. You take all the things you desire from a person -- sexual chemistry, let'southward say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick 3 of those things. The residue yous have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you lot have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the residue of your life with, and then y'all expect for those qualities in another person. That'south existent life. Don't you lot see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every erstwhile 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 repast and beingness made to eat information technology, for the ability, at last, at concluding, of believing a parent'due south 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

"they were inventing their own type of human relationship, i that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poesy or vocal, simply which felt truer and less constraining."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Trivial Life

"They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs lone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Piddling Life

"Information technology had e'er seemed to him a very costly kind of trouble, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"Simply these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from beingness dignified to being a sign of your ain cowardice. There were times when the force per unit area to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that anybody should and could attain, and that whatever sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault."
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Lilliputian Life

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