A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors,

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

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.

for him, or for his wife, Willem’s mother. Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich.

his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.