Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Because it did used to be cool, super-cool, in fact – she was our Magellan, our Marco Polo, one of the wayward Walker women whose restless boundless spirit propels her from place to place, love to love, moment to unpredictable moment.”

— Jandy Nelson

452. “God, you’re gorgeous,” I blurt out and want to die because I can’t believe I said it aloud and neither can he – his smile, so huge now, he can’t even get any words past it.”

— Jandy Nelson

453. “I think you could devastate me.”

— Jandy Nelson

454. “Grandma would put up the closed sign for my sewing lessons. At the table in the back of her shop, I’d sit on her lap and breathe in her flowery scent while learning to cut and drape and stitch. “Everyone gets a one-and-only and you’re mine,” she’d tell me. “Why me?” I’d always ask, and she’d nudge her elbow into my ribs and say something silly like, “Because you have such long toes, of course.”

— Jandy Nelson

455. “I tell her every detail. How he came over every morning with croissants, how we played music together, how he made Gram and Big so happy just by being in the house, how we drank wine last night and kissed until I was sure I had walked right into the sky. I told her how I think I can hear his heart beating even when he’s not there, how I feel like flowers – Gargantuan ones – are blooming in my chest.”

— Jandy Nelson

456. “Que me das un miedo terrible. Que a ti no te puedo poner barreras como a todo el mundo. Que me aterra la posibilidad de que me rompas.”

— Jandy Nelson

457. “I know I’m smiling just to look at him. I know that what he just said is making something unfurl inside. I know that all around the porch, a thick curtain of fog hides us from the world.”

— Jandy Nelson

458. “Love’s so complicated, Noah, isn’t it?” I.”

— Jandy Nelson

459. “They’re my ladies,” she’d tell Bails and me. “Halfway between here and there.”

— Jandy Nelson

460. “See feel draw: One verb.”

— Jandy Nelson

461. “We. Are. Off. Our. Feet. I look up. The air’s shimmering with light. The world is. Or I’m imagining this. Of course I am.”

— Jandy Nelson

462. “I wait in the cold air where his body was.”

— Jandy Nelson

463. “When men have it, no one seems to notice, they become astronauts or pilots or cartographers or criminals or poets. They don’t stay around long enough to know if they’ve fathered children or not. When women get it, well, it’s complicated, it’s just different.” “How?” I asked. “How is it different?” “Well, for instance, it’s not customary for a mother to not see her own girls for this many years, is it?” She had a point there.”

— Jandy Nelson

464. “Hey one sec, Oscar.” I catch him outside the door and brush a layer of dust off the back of his jacket. “That’s one dirty floor,” I say as I slip the hot burning words into his pocket. As I press play on my life.”

— Jandy Nelson

465. “He has his arms out like wings and is turning around and around, the wind rippling his clothes, the glow of the fire lighting him up like a phoenix.”

— Jandy Nelson

466. “Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction.”

— Jandy Nelson

467. “I nodded and something really big and bright in me crushed to nothing in an instant. I’m pretty sure it was my soul.”

— Jandy Nelson

468. “A comfortable quiet falls over us. Really comfortable, like we’ve lain on filthy floors corpselike together for several lifetimes now.”

— Jandy Nelson

469. “No matter where I look inside myself, I come across more love for him, for everything about him, his anger as much as his tenderness – he’s so alive, he makes me feel like I could take a bite out of the whole earth.”

— Jandy Nelson

470. “I’m at the edge of the world looking for my brother.”

— Jandy Nelson

471. “The stars have bewitched the sky of darkness.”

— Jandy Nelson

472. “What’s weird is that she looks like she’s in a windstorm all of a sudden. Her hair’s blowing and her dress is slightly billowing. I check under the table to see if there’s a vent or something, but there isn’t. See? Other mothers don’t have their own private weather. She’s smiling at us so warmly, like we’re puppies, and something catches in my chest.”

— Jandy Nelson

473. “She’d said not to feel like we had to copy exactly. I didn’t copy at all. I shook up the originals in my head and let them out all covered in me.”

— Jandy Nelson

474. “I blow up the freaking country. No one notices.”

— Jandy Nelson

475. “We’re petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again. This time because I am sad. And scared. And because my skin has never fit this badly before.”

— Jandy Nelson

476. “Real life blows. I’m allergic to it too.”

— Jandy Nelson

477. “And when you’re tired, you crawl into your flower and go to sleep. During the day, everyone talks in colors instead of sounds. It’s so quiet.”

— Jandy Nelson

478. “As I make my way back to the table, something becomes clear: life’s a freaking mess. In fact, I’m going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: for those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram’s right, there’s not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess.”

— Jandy Nelson

479. “It’s like he’s fallen out of time.”

— Jandy Nelson

480. “Only the luckiest humans find their split-apart, you see.”

— Jandy Nelson

481. “Sometimes, I’d see Sarah and her mom share a look across a room and I’d want to heave myself over like a table.”

— Jandy Nelson

482. “Maybe you stomped it to nothing and now he’s hollow and empty, a shell with no turtle inside.”

— Jandy Nelson

483. “Grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us Grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping Grief is a house where no one can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out.”

— Jandy Nelson

484. “What people say before they die will come true.”

— Jandy Nelson

485. “Catches me by my shirt, whips me around, and with one strong hand flat against my chest, he pushes me against a tree and kisses me so hard I go blind.”

— Jandy Nelson

486. “Plus, now that color has refastened itself to everything, it’s supernaturally amazing to be in the trees.”

— Jandy Nelson

487. “I have a very low eerie threshold.”

— Jandy Nelson

488. “How is it possible that something can seem like such a brilliant idea one day and such a bonehead one the next?”

— Jandy Nelson

489. “The music continues its fiery revolution all around us and there is a girl inside of me that wants to give in to the fanatical beat – she wants to dance wild and free all around the thumping, but unfortunately, that girl’s in me, not me.”

— Jandy Nelson

490. “I feel guilty that I’m still here...”

— Jandy Nelson

491. “You are remaking the world, Noah. Drawing by drawing.”

— Jandy Nelson

492. “I have a heart so I can give it to you alone!”

— Jandy Nelson

493. “This boy beaming before me, however, seems to glow in a class all his own. He must be from a very friendly part of the Milky Way.”

— Jandy Nelson

494. “We will never be those people again. She took them all with her.”

— Jandy Nelson

495. “Like he owns the air in the Northern Hemisphere.”

— Jandy Nelson

496. “I’ve never been to a party before, didn’t know it was like being miles and miles underground, where demons walk around with their hair on fire.”

— Jandy Nelson

497. “During the day, everyone talks in colors instead of sounds. It’s so quiet.”

— Jandy Nelson

498. “Most of the time people look less like you remember when you see them again. Not him. He’s shimmering in the air exactly like he’s been in my mind. He’s a light show.”

— Jandy Nelson

499. “Doesn’t he know popular people aren’t revolutionaries?”

— Jandy Nelson

500. “The truck blasts through the trees and I stick my hand out the window, trying to catch the wind in my palm like bails used to, missing her, missing the girl I used to be around her, missing who we all used to be. We will never be those people again. She took them all with her.”

— Jandy Nelson