a little life by hanya yanagihara

• one of his dearest friend sat alone on a disgusting sofa, making the slow, sad, lonely journey back to consciousness, back to the land of the living, without anyone at all by his side.
• he was so desperate to move away from the life he was in, the life he'd had; he wanted to be someone whom no one knew and who knew no one.
• and then he knew things he wished he didn't, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.
• they were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affection, of time, sometimes of money, always of information.
• somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. there were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.
• but what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? he couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted.
• "you have to talk about these things while they're fresh, or you'll never talk about them. i'm going to teach you how to talk about them, because it's going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it's going to fester inside you, and you're always going to think you're to blame. you'll be wrong, of course, but you'll always think it."
• i have become lost to the world. in which i otherwise wasted so much time. it means nothing to me. whether the world believes me dead. i can hardly say anything to refute it. for truly, i am no longer part of the world.
• fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. fear of everyone else, hatred of himself.