Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. – RUMI.”

— Jandy Nelson

202. “I can tell she’s crumpled up in a corner of herself, just like I do in emergencies. There’s a crawlspace in me that no one can get to, no matter what. I had no idea she had one too.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

204. “That’s what I said. There’s no peace to disturb. I kept telling the cop: No. Peace. To. Disturb. Man.”

— Jandy Nelson

205. “I go behind the telescope, peer into the eyepiece, and all the stars crash down on my head. It’s like taking a shower in the cosmos. I gasp.”

— Jandy Nelson

206. “Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.”

— Jandy Nelson

207. “But then sometimes you make a catastrophic mistake, you think I am going to kill myself because the sculpture is ruined, but in the end it come out more incredible than had you not made the mistake. This is why I love the rocks. When I sculpt with clay, it feel like cheating. It is too easy. It has no will of its own. The rocks are formidable. They stand up to you. It is a fair fight. Sometimes you win. Sometimes they win. Sometimes when they win, you win.”

— Jandy Nelson

208. “If a man doesn’t give his beloved the letter he writes, his love is true.”

— Jandy Nelson

209. “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

210. “Pockets are hand jails.”

— Jandy Nelson

211. “The blindness lasts just a second, then the colors start flooding into me: not through my eyes but right through my skin, replacing blood and bone, muscle and sinew, until I am redorangebluegreenpurpleyellowredorangebluegreenpurpleyellow.”

— Jandy Nelson

212. “Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, ‘Painting is a blind man’s profession’ and ‘To draw you must close your eyes and sing’. And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction, we take in every lesson we find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.”

— Jandy Nelson

213. “I feel way cool, like I’m wearing sunglasses even though I’m not.”

— Jandy Nelson

214. “I liked love safe between the covers of my novel.”

— Jandy Nelson

215. “I push him down and climb over and straddle him, holding his hands over his head so he’s helpless.”

— Jandy Nelson

216. “For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I’ll consider it.”

— Jandy Nelson

217. “I’m a human hourglass: Waiting, waiting, waiting for Brain Connelly to come home.”

— Jandy Nelson

218. “He carries pieces of the galaxy around in a bag.”

— Jandy Nelson

219. “Before leaving school I consorted with The Oracle: Google.”

— Jandy Nelson

220. “The guy’s life drunk, I think, makes Candide look like a sourpuss. Does he even know that death exists?”

— Jandy Nelson

221. “And there are horses galloping inside her. I can hear them.”

— Jandy Nelson

222. “There are times when surfing where you’ll take on a wave only to realize the bottom’s dropped out of it and so suddenly without warning you’re free-falling down the entire face. It feels like this.”

— Jandy Nelson

223. “Nor that he’s regarding my face with the same intensity I am his. We’re two paintings staring at each other across a room.”

— Jandy Nelson

224. “Hanging out with her is like sitting in an empty church. That’s why I like her.”

— Jandy Nelson

225. “Hot guys should be forced into footie pajamas.”

— Jandy Nelson

226. “To be clear: More than anything, I wish I hadn’t gone into that closet with Brian. But their story wasn’t over that night.”

— Jandy Nelson

227. “But the guilt didn’t have much of a chance against the dawning realisation that I was falling in love. I had stared out the window at the early-morning fog, wondering for a moment if she had sent Joe to me so I would know that in the same world where she could die, this could happen.”

— Jandy Nelson

228. “Es nuestra historia y la contamos como queremos.”

— Jandy Nelson

229. “Grief was a room filled with hungry desperate light.”

— Jandy Nelson

230. “Don’t be sad.” She says it so warmly, it makes the air change color. “It came right through the wall last night.”

— Jandy Nelson

231. “The feet of ghosts never touch the ground.”

— Jandy Nelson

232. “We were partners in sewing. And partners in luck-hunting: four-leaf clovers, sand-dollar birds, red sea glass, clouds shaped like hearts, the first daffodils of spring, ladybugs, ladies in oversized hats. Best to bet on all the horses, dear, she’d say. Quick, make a wish, she’d say. I bet. I wished. I was her disciple. I still am.”

— Jandy Nelson

233. “When we settle back into our selves, everything feels different, like if I turned on the light we’d be bears.”

— Jandy Nelson

234. “Who knows if she even believed in her bible at all or if she just preferred a world where hope and creativity and faith trump reason?”

— Jandy Nelson

235. “I watch him throw his head back in supreme happiness, like he’s hearing that he gets to choose the colors for all the sunsets from now on.”

— Jandy Nelson

236. “We are all broken. I mean, aren’t we now? I am. The whole wide world is.”

— Jandy Nelson

237. “Remake the world.”

— Jandy Nelson

238. “According to all the experts, it’s time for me to talk about what I’m going through... I can’t. I’d need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.”

— Jandy Nelson

239. “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 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. It’s like the day Mr. James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, “That’s it! That’s it!” to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.”

— Jandy Nelson

240. “It’s like a hand at your throat all the time, isn’t it? Nothing’s inevitable anymore. Not the next heartbeat, not anything.”

— Jandy Nelson

241. “But I don’t even care. I don’t even care that the sun’s going to burn out in a matter of years, ending all life on Earth, well, five billion years, but still, guess what? I don’t care. Well-being is a wonderful thing.”

— Jandy Nelson

242. “But then all of all a sudden the breath is kicked out of me and I’m shoved onto the cold hard concrete floor of my life now, because I remember I can’t run home after school and tell Bails about a new boy in band. My sister dies over and over again, all day long.”

— Jandy Nelson

243. “Everything’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” she says because she’s a people-mechanic and always knows when I’m malfunctioning.”

— Jandy Nelson

244. “Until it’s not clear if he’s making the sculpture or if the sculpture is making him.”

— Jandy Nelson

245. “Mothers are the parachutes.”

— Jandy Nelson

246. “In the worlds I make, anything could happen.”

— Jandy Nelson

247. “I don’t understand. I don’t. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door?”

— Jandy Nelson

248. “She looks like she’s holding in a dictionary of bad words or a nuclear war.”

— Jandy Nelson

249. “Again and again his tongue returns to that space between his front teeth. I’ll look at this tree instead.”

— Jandy Nelson

250. “Oscore is my favorite model,” he says. “He has a very strange face. I don’t know if you notice. God was very drunk when he made him. A little bit of this. A little bit of that. Brown eye. Green eye. Crooked nose, crooked mouth. Lunatic smile. Chipped tooth. Scar here, scar there. It is a puzzle.”

— Jandy Nelson