Oshima大島

It was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others.

The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas.

I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all - and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.

But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.

But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives – truly tell their lives – to one person?.

You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.

All the most terrifying ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.

There’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.

A Little Life By: Hanya Yanagihara #book - Part Two

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 a part of the world.

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.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?

None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.

Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely.

Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.