Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Guillermo taps his foot impatiently. Oscar winks at me, sending my stomach on an elevator ride. “To be continued,” he says.”

— Jandy Nelson

452. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

462. “Es bastante aburrido, pero los jugadores, bueno, ya saben...”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

467. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

469. “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

470. “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

471. “He didn’t know the moment he left in the morning, I’d go through the secret sketchpads he hid under his bed. It was like he’d discovered a whole new color spectrum. It was like he’d found another galaxy of imagery. It was like he’d replaced me.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

480. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

483. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

488. “And the right thing is turning our backs on what might be the love story of our lives? The right thing is denying destiny, denying all the forces that have conspired to bring us together, forces that have been at work for years now? No way.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

490. “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

491. “Except don’t you need to be claimed to be a daughter? Don’t you need to be loved?”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

493. “Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus, the thick sugary pine, aware of each breath I take, how each one keeps me in the world a few seconds longer. I taste the sweetness of the summer air on my tongue and want to just gulp and gulp and gulp it into my body – this living, breathing, heart-beating body of mine.”

— Jandy Nelson

494. “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

495. “You’re the author of you own story.”

— Jandy Nelson

496. “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

497. “That’s what happened to him then: love. Tragic, impossible love.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

499. “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

500. “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