Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “We walk and walk through the gray ashy dusk and the forest starts to fall asleep: The trees lie down side by side by side, the creek halts, the plants sink back into the earth, the animals switch places with their shadows, and then, so do we.”

— Jandy Nelson

152. “A few times I try to form a question so it sounds casual and normal, but each time the words get caught somewhere in my throat and never make it out.”

— Jandy Nelson

153. “I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emtied on our heads from above. This is it. This is freaking everything. This is the painting painting itself.”

— Jandy Nelson

154. “He smiles and takes his index finger and presses it to my lips, leaves it there until my heart lands on Jupiter: three seconds, then removes it, and heads back into the living room. Whoa – well, that was either the dorkiest or sexiest moment of my life, and I’m voting for sexy on account of my standing here dumbstruck and giddy, wondering if he did kiss me after all.”

— Jandy Nelson

155. “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

— Jandy Nelson

156. “She gives off light, I give off dark.”

— Jandy Nelson

157. “I’d need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.”

— Jandy Nelson

158. “She’s like his spirit animal, a gentle, odd, spritely being who I’m pretty sure has a storage space full of fairy dust.”

— Jandy Nelson

159. “Dusk splatters pink and orange across the sky, beginning its languorous summer stroll. I hear the river through the trees sounding like possibility –.”

— Jandy Nelson

160. “You duck! You flying yellow duck! And you took this long to tell me?!” When Sarah gets excited, random animals pop into her speech like she has an Old MacDonald Had a Farm kind of Tourette syndrome.”

— Jandy Nelson

161. “Its like I have a window in my chest where sunlight is pouring in.”

— Jandy Nelson

162. “I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.”

— Jandy Nelson

163. “How can I be mad at her for finding her split-apart and wanting to be with him? As Guillermo said, the heart doesn’t listen to reason. It doesn’t abide by laws or conventions or other people’s expectations either.”

— Jandy Nelson

164. “Revolutionaries aren’t team players.”

— Jandy Nelson

165. “I wish the world would stick like a clock so I could look at him for as long as I want.”

— Jandy Nelson

166. “We are, each one of us for the other, a key to a door that otherwise would’ve remained locked forever.”

— Jandy Nelson

167. “Really, most of the time, I feel like a hostage.”

— Jandy Nelson

168. “To be clear, when you’re me, guys like him are kryptonite, not that I’ve ever met a guy like him before, one who makes you feel like you’re being kissed, no, ravished, from across a room.”

— Jandy Nelson

169. “I think about those two guys in the sky causing shipwrecks, causing things to burst into flame...”

— Jandy Nelson

170. “I think of that counselor telling me i was the house in the woods with no doors or windows. No way to get in or out, she said. But she was wrong, because: Walls fall down.”

— Jandy Nelson

171. “God was very drunk when he made him.”

— Jandy Nelson

172. “Listen, it is not the charcoal that draws the picture. It is you. It is your hand, which is attached to your body, and in that body is a beating heart...”

— Jandy Nelson

173. “I feel relaxed now, I mean supernaturally relaxed, like I’m left out butter.”

— Jandy Nelson

174. “I can’t even remember what he looked like now, but I’ll never forget the reaction I had when I first saw him in Noah’s drawing pad. I had to have him. I would’ve given up the real sun, so giving him an imaginary one was nothing.”

— Jandy Nelson

175. “It occurs to me that Jude does this too, changes who she is depending on who she’s with. They’re like toads changing their skin color. How come I’m always just me?”

— Jandy Nelson

176. “He looks at me incredulously. “I think you’re amazing... ” Why would he think this? Bailey is amazing and Gram and Big, and of course Mom, but not me. I am the two-dimensional one in a 3-D Family.”

— Jandy Nelson

177. “In a flash, we’re through the door, across the street and into the woods, running for no reason and laughing for no reason and totally out of breath and out of our minds when Brian 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

178. “A painting is both exactly the same and entirely different every single time you look at it.”

— Jandy Nelson

179. “I believe in nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. – JOHN KEATS.”

— Jandy Nelson

180. “He had a mad desire to draw, to kiss the boy next door,, to peel the blue off the sky, to be the blue in the sky.”

— Jandy Nelson

181. “You asked what it would be like. This is what it will be like. I don’t want to be just friends.”

— Jandy Nelson

182. “Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath... Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other.”

— Jandy Nelson

183. “Guys like him really shouldn’t be allowed on motorcycles. They should have to bounce around on pogo sticks, or better: Hippity Hops. And no hot guy should be allowed to have an English accent and drive a motorcycle. Not to mention wear the leather jacket or sport the cool shades. Hot guys should be forced into footie pajamas.”

— Jandy Nelson

184. “I look like the freaking Aurora Borealis...”

— Jandy Nelson

185. “Para que se produzcan milagros tienes que ser capaz de verlos.”

— Jandy Nelson

186. “There’s nothing giggly about Heather usually. She’s the opposite; hanging out with her is like sitting in an empty church. That’s why I like her. She’s quiet and serious and a thousand years old and seems like she can talk to the wind.”

— Jandy Nelson

187. “He’s looking at me in that way of his that should be illegal or patented, and it’s affecting my ability to remember things like my name and species and all the reasons a girl might go on a boy strike.”

— Jandy Nelson

188. “Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris.”

— Jandy Nelson

189. “Mothers are the parachutes.”

— Jandy Nelson

190. “Me would like an invisibility cloak to get the hell out of this mess.”

— Jandy Nelson

191. “I didn’t know love felt like this, like turning into brightness.”

— Jandy Nelson

192. “Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn’t know dreams could hide inside a person.”

— Jandy Nelson

193. “What is bad for the heart is good for art.”

— Jandy Nelson

194. “But sometimes I think Dad suspects. Sometimes I think the toaster suspects.”

— Jandy Nelson

195. “In the middle of all this tragedy, you’re growing up, sweet pie, and that is such a wonderful thing.”

— Jandy Nelson

196. “When I draw it, I’m going to make my skin see-through and what you’ll see is that all the animals in the zoo of me have broken out of their cages.”

— Jandy Nelson

197. “It’s not as easy for her to tell what’s in mine, though, because I have shutters and I close them whenever I have to. Like lately.”

— Jandy Nelson

198. “Noah and I made a deal. He’ll stop jumping off cliffs if I stop bible-thumping and suspend all medical research, effective immediately.”

— Jandy Nelson

199. “The timbre of his voice has a lot in common with thunder.”

— Jandy Nelson

200. “Not because he looks familiar on the outside this time, but because he feels familiar on the inside.”

— Jandy Nelson