Quotes from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The People in the Trees

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

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

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

“When he came down, he was slower, and clutching something his hand. He leapt down the last 5 feet or so and came over to me, uncurling his fingers. In his palm was something trembling and silky and the bright, delicious pale gold of apples; in the gloom of the jungle it looked like light itself. Uva nudged the thing with a finger and it turned over, and I could see it was a monkey of some sort, though no monkey I had ever seen before; it was only a few inches larger than one of the mice I had once been tasked with killing, and his face was a wrinkled black heart, its features pinched together but its eyes large and as blankly blue as a blind kitten's. It had tiny, perfectly formed hands, one of which was gripping its tail, which it had wrapped around itself and which was flamboyantly furred, its hair hanging like a fringe.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The People in the Trees

“I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life-food, shelter, weaponry-being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from The People in the Trees

“Tallent notes that the days surrounding the death are marked not by keening or weeping but instead by a "dignified, almost majestical, sense of quiet and contemplation. The deceased's immediate family continues to go about their daily rituals, but their silence, their lack of chatter in this busy, intimate community, is a ritual in itself, and the other villagers give them peace until the bereaved signal their intention to return to the life of the community. Sometimes this silent mourning takes only days; sometimes it takes months. But it is a remarkable demonstration of being absent in a place so intensely present, of being granted solitude while surrounded by many”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from The People in the Trees

“what I loved most was their scent, one that mingled sweetness and decay at once”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from 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, quote from The People in the Trees

“it was all a dazzling, indistinct wash of blue, an audacious blue with no name, so insistent and unvaried I had to close my eyes. U”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from The People in the Trees

“And yet—and this was even more frightening still—I could also feel something within me come undone. Even today, all these decades later, I cannot explain it with any greater accuracy. I found myself suddenly imagining a long, fat, chalked line stretching across a flat burned earth. To one side was what I had known, a neat-bricked city of windowless structures, the stuff and facts I knew to be true (I thought, unbidden, of my staircase, its names of those wiser than I, and was at once embarrassed for myself, for finding myself in this situation, in speechless thrall to an anthropologist). And on the other side was Tallent’s world, the shape of which I could not see, for it was obscured by a fog, one that thinned and thickened in unpredictable movements, so that I could discern, occasionally, glimpses of what lay behind it: nothing more than colors and movements, no real shapes; but there was something irresistible there, I knew it, and the fear of succumbing to it was finally less awful than never knowing what lay beyond that fog, never exploring what I might never again have the opportunity to explore. And”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The People in the Trees

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