# Quote — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

> Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere…If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.

- Author: [Hanya Yanagihara](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hanya-yanagihara.md)
- Book: [A Little Life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hanya-yanagihara/a-little-life.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hanya_Yanagihara#A_Little_Life_(2015_novel)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/hanya-yanagihara/a-little-life/relationships-never-provide

## More from this book

> 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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hanya-yanagihara/a-little-life/friendship-was-witnessing.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hanya-yanagihara/a-little-life/wasnt-friendship-its.md)

> You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hanya-yanagihara/a-little-life/you-wont-understand.md)