A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?

One of my favorite quotes ever.

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.