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“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

“Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).

I don't think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn't want to eat.

But it's for you, Willem.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But being with you is like being in this fantastic landscape,' he continuous slowly. 'You think it's one thing, a forest, and then suddenly it changes, and it's a meadow, or a jungle, or cliffs, or ice. And they are all beautiful, but they're strange as well, and you don't have a map, and you don't understand how you got from one terrain to the next so abruptly, and you don't know when the next transition will arrive, and you don't have any of the equipment you need. And so you keep walking through, and trying to adjust as you go, but you don't really know what you're doing, and often you make mistakes, bad mistakes. That's sometimes what it feels like.'
They're silent. 'So basically,' Jude says at last, 'basically you're saying I'm New Zealand.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life