To Paradise Quotes

“I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. I cannot promise that my granddaughter won't be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone. I have made certain that her life will have a witness.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“we are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“...but because he had enough of being someones legacy; he knew the fear of feeling inadequate, the burden of disappointing. He would never do it again; he would be free. 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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“lately, I’ve been thinking about … 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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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.” At the time, he’d laughed and called her melodramatic, and a reactionary man-hater, but that night, as he lay in bed, he had thought about what she said and wondered if she was correct.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“It's funny—of all the things I was scared of, I was never scared of the dark. In the dark, everyone was helpless, and, knowing that, that I was just like everyone else, no less, made me feel braver.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone. So he would stand here for another moment, the bag leaden in his hand, and then he would take a breath, and then he would make his first step: his first step to a new life; his first step—to paradise.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“I had the strange sense that I was looking inside a diorama, at a scene of happiness I could witness but never enter”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“My identity changed with the neighborhood I found myself in. In midtown, they thought I might be black, but in Harlem, they knew I wasn’t. I was spoken to in Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and even Hindi, and when I answered, “I’m Hawaiian,” I would invariably be told that they or their brother or cousin had been there after the war, and asked what I was doing up here, so far from home, when I could be on the beach with a pretty little hula girl. I never had an answer to these questions, but they didn’t expect one—it was all they knew to ask, but no one wanted to hear what I had to say.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“It will soon be a new year,” his grandfather said into this silence, “and new years are always more revealing than old ones. You will make your decision, and it will be yes or no, and the years will keep ending and beginning and ending and beginning, whatever you choose.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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 assuming the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“In later years, I would think: If only we had had a few more weeks with him close to our side, away from the word; if only we could have convinced him that safety was valuable, and that we could be the ones to provide it to him. But we hadn't had a few more weeks, and we hasn't been able to convince him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“He had always been wary of children, their unflinching, unbroken gazes that suggested they could see him in a way that adults no longer bothered to or could,”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“We have learned to accommodate that person as much as we can, to ignore who we know ourselves to be. Most of the time, we're succesful. We must be: Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we had lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. Indeed, it feels at times as if all who remain are those who were wily or tenacious or scheming enough to survive. I know that this belief is its own kind of romance, but in my more fanciful moments, it makes perfect sense - we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left some other realm we can only dream of, the door to which we're too frightened to open, even to peek inside.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“He was a chair, a clock, a scarf draped over the back of the settee, something the eye had registered so many times that it now glided over it, its presence so familiar that it had already been drawn and pasted into the scene before the curtain rose.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“everything was good, or good enough, and yet I had the sensation at that moment that I was atop a large piece of white plastic tubing, and the tube was rolling down a dirt path, and I was surfing it, almost, my feet constantly moving, trying to stay upright. That was what life felt like.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“He was no one; he was nothing; he was a man who was in love with Edward Bishop and he was, for perhaps the first time in his life, doing something he wanted, something that frightened him, but something that was his own. He was choosing foolishly, perhaps, but he was choosing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Does this look like a dystopia to you?”
The answer, implicit in the man’s question, was that a dystopia doesn’t look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“That pretty fiction we told ourselves when we were younger, that our friends were our family, as good as our spouses and children, was revealed in that first pandemic to be a lie: The people you loved the most were in fact the people you had chosen to live with—friends were an indulgence, a luxury, and if discarding them meant you might better protect your family, then you discarded them quickly. In the end, you chose, and you never chose your friends, not if you had a partner or a child. You moved on, and you forgot them, and your life was no poorer for it.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Nathaniel always says h’s mature for his age, which is one of those things worried parents say about their children when their children baffle them, but I think what he’s mature in is his loneliness. A child can be alone. But he shouldn’t be lonely. And our child is.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“He was attuned to the dangers of the world but not to its delights and joys; even love, to him, was not a state of elation but a source of anxiety and fear: Did his beloved actually love him? When might he be abandoned? He had watched first Eden and then John in their courtships, had witnessed their returning home late in the evening, their cheeks pink with wine and dancing, had seen how quickly they snatched letters from the tray proffered by Adams, tearing open the envelopes even as they hurried from the room, their lips already lifting into smiles. The fact that he had not experienced the same kind of happiness was a source of both sorrow and concern; of late, he had been beginning to fear that it was not just that no one might love him but that he might be incapable of receiving such love, which seemed altogether worse. His infatuation with Edward, then, the awakening he felt within him, was not just transporting for the sensation itself but intensified by his sense of relief: There was nothing wrong with him after all.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise