To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.

He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say.

Though lately I’ve been wondering if it’s so lucky at all, being so conscious, being so aware that, from now on, you’ll never progress. You’ll never become more educated or learned or interesting than you are right now—everything you do, and experience, from the moment you begin actively dying is useless, a futile attempt to change the end of the story. And yet you keep trying to do it anyway—read what you haven’t read and see what you haven’t seen. But it isn’t for anything, you see. You just do it out of practice—because that’s what a human does.”

The ignorant person dies the same way as the educated one. It makes no difference in the end.”

But pleasure doesn’t change anything, really. Not that one should do or not do things because they make no difference in the end.”

“I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”

there are some people in your life where it’s just—it’s just easier not to know too much about them.”

But in the end, they were both dependents, disappointed by their past and frightened by their present.

their preoccupation so complete that, had anyone seen them, he would have mistaken them for strangers.

I wonder who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try.

In those years, fear—of sounding dumb, of being inadequate—kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.

What was the point of loving him, of being loved back, if he wasn’t going to try?

Loss, loss—he had lost so much. How would he ever feel complete again? How could he make up for all those years? How could he forgive? How could he be forgiven?

The point is that I never see everything new; everything I see I’ve seen before.

We often end up resenting our children when they achieve what we’ve wished for them—although this isn’t my way of saying that I resent you, even though my only wish was that you grow up and leave me behind.

I would feel embarrassed, because I knew that I was reading nothing important, that I didn’t really have the right to call myself a reader.

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.

They were never cruel to me, they never bullied me, but that was only because I wasn’t worth bullying.

there were boys who bullied me, but I grew used to that as well—it was a kind of attention.

had the strange sense that I was looking inside a diorama, at a scene of happiness I could witness but never enter.

royalty needs people to revere them, or they cease to be royalty.