To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

because I do not wish that my silence should be mistaken for lack of devotion.

because exhaustion was a privilege of the living.

“Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.”

A person was the worst legacy, because a person was by definition unpredictable.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

fathers were shadowy presences in all of our lives.

“There are no Negroes in Hawai‘i,”