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“There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be; even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he would become. But his friends, Ana, Lucien, Harold and Julia: They had imagined his life for him. They had seen him as something different than he had ever seen himself as; they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived. He saw his life as the axiom of equality, but they saw it as another riddle, one with no name—Jude = x—and they had filled in the x in ways Brother Luke, the counselors at the home, Dr. Traylor had never written for him or encouraged him to write for himself. He wishes he could believe their proofs the way they do; he wishes they had shown him how they had arrived at their solutions.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You spent so much time explaining yourself, your work to others—what it meant, what you were trying to accomplish, why you had chosen the colors and subject matter and materials and application and technique that you had—that it was a relief to simply be with another person to whom you didn’t have to explain anything.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life