16 Quotes from A Little Life book by Hanya Yanagihara
Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 16 quotes from A Little Life book by Hanya Yanagihara that I underlined while reading the book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Friendship
- Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.
- Friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information.
- 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 them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad - or good - it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.
Quotes on Relationships
- The ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.
- Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things.
- 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.
Quotes on Children
- 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.
- The point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all - and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.
Quotes on New York
- New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common.
- All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry.
More Quotes
- We don't get the families we deserve.
- What was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain.
- A society cannot run as it should unless people with excellent legal minds make it their business to make it run.
- Success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing - success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas.
- People who don't love 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.
- Life is so sad. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.