A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

his only obligation to them was to be happy, to live exactly the life he wanted, on the terms he wanted.

To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.

He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; he felt sometimes that he was seeing them for the first time, even after so many years of knowing them.

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?

But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.

“It’s just that I don’t think that every rejection is meaningless,

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain,

It means nothing to me / Whether the world believes me dead / I can hardly say anything to refute it / For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.

Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

As an adult, he became obsessed in spells with trying to identify the exact moment in which things had started going so wrong, as if he could freeze it, preserve it in agar, hold it up and teach it before a class: This is when it happened. This is where it started.

But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear.

Fairness is a concept taught to nice children:

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own,

he had the presence of mind to understand that he was responding less to the images themselves than to the memories and sensations they provoked,