Ruby

“There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“he feels he isn’t so much living as he is merely existing,”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life