I love you more than I love my own self.
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Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara (born September 20, 1974) is an American novelist and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. 2Early life Yanagihara was born in Los Angeles, California, a fourth-generation Hawaiian, to a father who was a hematologist/oncologist, Richard Yanagihara, from Hawaii and a mother who was born in Seoul. She frequently moved around the United States as a child, due to her father's occupation. The family lived in multiple locations, including Hawaii, New York City, Baltimore, Maryland, California, and Texas. She attended Punahou High School in Hawaii. 2Career Following her graduation from the women's college Smith College in 1995, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist. In 2007, Yanagihara began writing for Condé Nast Traveler where she became an editor before leaving in 2015 to become a deputy editor at the style magazine T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013. Yanagihara's A Little Life was published in March 2015, again receiving predominantly favorable reviews, and defying expectations by its editor, Yanagihara's agent, and the author herself that it would not sell wel
Please tell me you forgive me. I was so awful. I love you, you know that. I would never want to hurt you, never.
He understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.
Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice. Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores. This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him. It will end badly,…
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could…
And he thinks he begins to cry, but he is unable to produce tears. Everything has gone so wrong, he thinks; how did everything go so wrong?
Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
Days were defined, glossed, by a certain tonal consistency.
I would walk through campus and overhear conversations — someone talking about splitting up with her boyfriend, someone talking about a bad grade he got on a test, someone talking about his sprained ankle — and would feel rage. You stupid, petty, selfish, self-absorbed people, I wanted to say. You…
The person I am will always be the person I am, I realize. The context may have changed… But fundamentally, I'm the same person.
Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.
Since then, he has tried to tell Willem more things. But there are so many topics that he has never discussed with anyone since Ana, now twenty-five years ago, that he finds he literally doesn't have the language to do so. His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself — they…
But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?
When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?
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. There was a period — or at least you hoped there was — with every painting or project when…
New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common.
Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip 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’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to…
You know I don’t agree with what you did. But I understand why you did it.