The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

But then, I have never believed in romancing the past—what good would it do me?

He had the sort of face that was memorable for its absences rather than its presences:

As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life.

What can you say of a man who neglects his house until his house destroys him?

Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one’s intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind.

I had gone into science for its adventure, but to them, adventure was something to be endured, not sought, on the road to inevitable greatness.

lack of interest has a kind way of eliminating all potential nervousness.

Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.

later I understood it: gods are for stories and heavens and other realms; they are not to be seen by men. But when we encroach on their world, when we see what we are not meant to see, how can anything but disaster follow?

It is only the old who can look around them and marvel, for it is we who know how alike the world really is, how all of its problems and wonders have already been recognized and recorded.

And suddenly, watching these short-lived creatures eating another short-lived creature, all of them spending their days searching only for a taste of something delicious, the jungle seemed a very sad place to me,

on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.

it. However, I considered her omission the worst sort of intellectual hypocrisy: when documenting a culture, one cannot simply leave out details that one finds distasteful or shocking or that do not fit into the tidy narrative one has constructed.

But my time on Ivu’ivu taught me that all ethics or morals are culturally relative.

But I think about him often, more often than I think anyone would expect. When he vanished, I am afraid I have to admit, something I had once had vanished as well: the ability to care as intensely, one might diagnose it, but something else as well. I wonder sometimes, if he had remained in our world, how I might be different, how I might ultimately have found satisfaction other than in the ways I eventually did. And I suppose that if I were made to come to a conclusion, I would have to say that I too think that the jungle devoured him, and that somewhere he walks through it still.

Shall I tell you how I was always wrong—eighteen, nineteen, twenty times wrong—and how although I was always wrong, I didn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, I was searching, searching, searching.

It was one of the central ironies of the place that the very people who had enabled me to discover immortality were so far from immortal themselves.

I didn’t like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone.

Silence would perhaps have perplexed me, but children can never resist the sound of their own voices,