The People in the Trees Quotes

“Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Oh god, I thought, can nothing in this jungle behave as it ought? Must fruits move and trees breathe and freshwater rivers taste of the ocean? Why must nothing obey the laws of nature? Why must everything point so heavily toward the existence of enchantment?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life--which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling--was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I have never found it difficult, as some do, to speak to children. All one has to do is pretend that they're some kind of intelligent farm animal: a pig, perhaps, or a horse.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“the ocean, its remorseless, lonely conversation with itself”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller’s property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.

And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death — but kindness?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I didn't like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“gods are for stories and heavens and other realms; they are not to be seen by men. But when we encroach on their world, when we see what we are not meant to see, how can anything but disaster follow?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“It disappointed me when I discerned as an adolescent that my father had married my mother only for her beauty, but this was before I realized that parents disappoint us in many ways and it is best not to expect anything of them at all, for chances are that they won't be able to deliver it.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I had thought to seize the image in my head and preserve it in wax, so that I might always be able to look upon it as one of those rare moments in which one senses the plates of the world shift beneath one and life is forever altered: on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“To be a scientist is to learn to live all one's life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“But time, I have come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs. We speak of managing time, but it is the opposite. Our lives are filled with businesses because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is rarely true.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“There is a point - for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago - when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I know it is not a very popular thing to say, but I have always believed, even before this occasion, that certain ethnic groups are predisposed to certain types of behavior or, perhaps more accurately, naturally endowed with certain characteristics. The Germans and Japanese, for example (and I don't think it possible to dispute this), have an organic predilection for a particular brand of refined cruelty, the French for a kind of glamorous laziness that they have managed to pass off as languor, the Russians for alcoholism, the Koreans for surliness, the Chinese for parsimoniousness, the English for homosexuality.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is very rarely true.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Poor house! I thought, and at moments I would find myself stroking one of its whitepainted doorframes as if I were petting a horse's nose: gently, slowly, trying to soothe it back to calmness.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I should have left him, thought. It was never my place to try to save something that no one else had wanted.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“the sound here was of no sound, of a place holding its breath, an edgy, bitten-back quiet, as if it would at once explode with the color and noise of a great party.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“El problema de ser joven y encontrarse en un lugar especial es que uno da por hecho que será inevitable encontrarse en un enclave igual de exótico y desconocido en algún otro momento de su vida. Pero esto raras veces se cumple.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense. In”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“my father said the whole world seemed made of sound and nothing else.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees