“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 Copy Share Image
“People who don’t love math always accuse mathematicians of trying to make math complicated,” Dr. Li had said. “But anyone who does love math knows it’s really the opposite: math rewards simplicity, and mathematicians value it above all else. So it’s no surprise that Walter’s favorite axiom was also the most simple in the realm of mathematics: the axiom of… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share
“At night, as beneath him his parents completed their routines, the banging of the old pipes as they washed their faces and the sudden thunk into silence as they turned down the living-room radiators better than any clock at indicating that was eleven, eleven thirty, midnight, he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share
To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade or two to find an answer. Then the answer they get may not even answer the question they thought it would. You have to have a supple enough mind to be open… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share
“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better?” — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share Image
“But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and,… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share
“I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share
“my father said the whole world seemed made of sound and nothing else.” — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share Image
“He cleaned so he wouldn't cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share Image
“There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share Image
The big characters who occupy science, especially modern science, are all "off" in fundamental ways. I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. I… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share
“Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share Image
