Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

453. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

455. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

458. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

460. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

462. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

466. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

470. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

473. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

475. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

477. “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

478. “We’re petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again.”

— Jandy Nelson

479. “It’s about magic.” He shakes his head. “How could I have forgotten that?”

— Jandy Nelson

480. “Bailey loved both Toby and me so much – he and I almost make up her whole heart, and maybe that’s it, what we were trying to do by being together, maybe we were trying to put her heart back together again.”

— Jandy Nelson

481. “I don’t know if you notice. God was very drunk when he made him.”

— Jandy Nelson

482. “We’re sprinting at the speed of light when the ground gives way and we rise into the air as if racing up stairs.”

— Jandy Nelson

483. “Los actos de atrapar al vuelo, lanzar, patear y golpear me producen alergia en todas sus versiones.”

— Jandy Nelson

484. “I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something. Like kiss Brian. The idea snags me and then I can’t get out of it. I totally should’ve tried. But what if he’d punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d kissed me back? Because I’d catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.”

— Jandy Nelson

485. “Guillermo taps his foot impatiently. Oscar winks at me, sending my stomach on an elevator ride. “To be continued,” he says.”

— Jandy Nelson

486. “His nose is like a capsized ship, his mouth the size of three, his jaw and cheekbones hefty as armor, and his eyes are iridescent. His face is a room overstuffed with massive furniture.”

— Jandy Nelson

487. “There is the world, remade.”

— Jandy Nelson

488. “It’s amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.”

— Jandy Nelson

489. “English people are so not asshats! I’m going to move there. William Blake was English.”

— Jandy Nelson

490. “Good. That is it. You will see with your hands, I promise you.”

— Jandy Nelson

491. “You hurt before you can be hurt.”

— Jandy Nelson

492. “So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way.”

— Jandy Nelson

493. “She dies over and over again, all day long.”

— Jandy Nelson

494. “I was crashed un Gram’s garden and Big asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking up at the sky. he said ″ that’s a misconception, Lennie, the sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet″.”

— Jandy Nelson

495. “My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier.”

— Jandy Nelson

496. “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

497. “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

498. “I think you could devastate me.”

— Jandy Nelson

499. “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

500. “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