RELATIONSHIPS

'Now, though, as an almost forty-eight-year-old, he saw people's relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples - in restaurants, on the street, at parties - and wondered: Why  are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What's missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.568. 

PASTORAL CARE

'Most people are easy: their unhappiness are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable. But his were not. We didn't know how to help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems.' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.359. 

PARENTING

'We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don't want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren't equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap - if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.345, 

CHILDLESSNESS

'Children are a kind of kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born. 

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one's status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, or perpetual doubt.' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.309.  

SINGLENESS

'Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feel sorry for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.

Either way, being single is forty is different from being single at thirty, and with every year it becomes less understandable, less enviable, and more pathetic, more inappropriate.' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.304. 

MIND THE GAP

'It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick...' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.240.  

FRIENDSHIP

'Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in all his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And, anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? 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 shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. 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.'
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.225. 

MATCH-MAKING FRIENDS

'He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with people he loved.'

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.127.

FRIENDSHIP

'Can you have a real friendship when some part of you was always expecting betrayal?'

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.126.

A BEAUTIFUL DESCRIPTION

'...where the porch light washed the night with honey.'

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.55.

RELATIONSHIPS

'...that process - getting to know someone - was always so much more challenging than he remembered. He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence - the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts - could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties' limits were understood and respected.'

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.121.