01c. 1974 ADHe wasn't so elderly after all, I saw: probably just a few years older than I. And yet I was never able (and am still not) to think of myself as old. I talked as if I knew I was; I bemoaned my age. But it was only for comedy, or to make other people feel young.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
02c. 1974 ADHe will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and most wretched moments, the one that asks him who he thinks he is to inconvenience so many people, to think he has the right to keep going when even his own body tells him he should stop.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
03c. 1974 AD...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.And after that, you have nothing to fear again.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
04c. 1974 ADEveryone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn't happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren't necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
05c. 1974 ADIt was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
06c. 1974 ADThe problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is rarely true.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
07c. 1974 ADAnd that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyday. For a brief period - briefer and briefer with each week - the world was splendid and unknown.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
08c. 1974 ADHis persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
09c. 1974 ADI don’t really think of myself as gay, though,” he began, and Kit rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so naïve, Willem,” he said. “Once you’ve touched a dick, you’re gay.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
10c. 1974 ADHe would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving person.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
11c. 1974 ADHe 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 / quote ↗
12c. 1974 AD. . .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.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
13c. 1974 ADIn those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
14c. 1974 ADHe 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1974 ADhe tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrongHanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
16c. 1974 ADPeople who don't like math always accuse mathematicians of trying to make math complicated. (...) But anyone who does love math knows it's really the opposite: math rewards simplicity, and mathematicians value it above all else. So it's no surprise that Walter's favourite axiom was also the most simple in the realm of mathematics: the axiom of the empty set. The axiom of the empty set is the axiom of zero. it states that there must be a concept of nothingness, that there must be the concept of zero: zero value, zero items. Math assumes there's a concept of nothingness, but is it proven? No. But it must exist.And if we're being philosophical—which we today are—we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist. So I prefer to think that Walter has not died but has instead proven for himself the axiom of the empty set, that he has proven the concept of zero. I know nothing else would have made him happier. An elegant mind wants elegant endings, and Walter had the most elegant mind. So I wish him goodbye; I wish him the answer to the axiom he so loved.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
17c. 1974 ADLife itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
18c. 1974 ADHe 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1974 ADHe 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1974 ADNo religion makes more use of color than Hinduism, with its blue-skinned gods and peony-lipped goddesses, and even the spring festival of Holi is focused on color: Boys squirt arcs of dyed water on passersby or dump powder, all violently hued, on their marks.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
21c. 1974 ADEvery traveler knows too well the endless quest for the perfect travel bag: the one that's stylish enough to carry through Paris, sturdy enough to tote around Peru, and - most important - doesn't make your shoulder sag even before you've loaded it up with everything you need for a day of sightseeing.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
22c. 1974 ADI have never wanted a family. I don't believe in marriage, though I obviously believe it should be legal for everyone who wants to do it. But it is not something I believe in, nor do the characters in my book, nor do any of my friends.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
23c. 1974 ADKashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
24c. 1974 ADI think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids.Hanya Yanagihara / quote ↗
