The People in the Trees
Hanya Yanagihara
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants.”
“Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.”
“I didn't like him, but I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone.”
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Book Keywords:
fiction, morals, mothers, ethics, infj, culture, dreams, death-and-dying, beauty, moral-relativism, introspection
