Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “This is it – what all the hoopla is about, what Wuthering Heights is about – it all boils down to this feeling rushing through me in this moment with Joe as our mouths refuse to part. Who knew all this time I was one kiss away from being Cathy and Juliet and Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Chatterley!?”

— Jandy Nelson

252. “And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?”

— Jandy Nelson

253. “That counselor said ghosts – she used finger quotes around the word – are often manifestations of a guilty conscience. Check. Or sometimes of a deep inner longing. Check. She said the heart overcomes mind. Hope or fear overcomes reason.”

— Jandy Nelson

254. “What’s your major, Lennie? Oh yeah: Dorkology.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

257. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

260. “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

261. “What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.”

— Jandy Nelson

262. “Isn’t that what I always think when I get The Poor Motherless Girl Look? Like I’ve been shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes.”

— Jandy Nelson

263. “Okay. Not gay. Not lovers, they both just appear to like donuts more than your average bear.”

— Jandy Nelson

264. “She glitters like she walked out of a Klimt painting.”

— Jandy Nelson

265. “I’d rather sit next to Brian for two hours in a dark theater than have a wall painting party with Jackson Pollock.”

— Jandy Nelson

266. “She’s a people-mechanic and always knows when I’m malfunctioning.”

— Jandy Nelson

267. “His laugh cartwheels across the room.”

— Jandy Nelson

268. “So much blood’s rushing and gushing to my head it might blow straight off my neck.”

— Jandy Nelson

269. “If someone told me I could hang out in da Vinci’s studio while he painted the Mona Lisa or go up on Brian’s roof with him at night – I’m on the roof.”

— Jandy Nelson

270. “Dad puts one hand on either side of the frame, filling the entire doorway, filling the Continental United States. How can I hate him and wish I were more like him at the same time?”

— Jandy Nelson

271. “Parents aren’t allowed to kiss like this!”

— Jandy Nelson

272. “I suspect that inside the impenetrable fortress of conventionality he’s become, there’s one crazy-ass museum.”

— Jandy Nelson

273. “What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens?”

— Jandy Nelson

274. “I want to grab him by the wrist and head back into the woods, tell these guys, sorry but I found him first.”

— Jandy Nelson

275. “Las personas mueren, pero nuestras relaciones con ellas no. Perviven y se transforman por siempre.”

— Jandy Nelson

276. “I gasp, because Isn’t that just exactly what I’ve been doing too: writing poems and scattering them to the winds with the same hope as Gram that someone, someday, somewhere might understand who I am, who my sister was, and what happened to us.”

— Jandy Nelson

277. “When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she’s whispering in my ear.”

— Jandy Nelson

278. “To draw you must close your eyes and sing.”

— Jandy Nelson

279. “What if there was a time when I was going through hell too, but I didn’t have the courage to keep going? So I just stopped. Pressed pause. What if I’m still on pause?”

— Jandy Nelson

280. “I can unzip the air and disappear inside it.”

— Jandy Nelson

281. “His eyes have become gentle. I’m swimming in them.”

— Jandy Nelson

282. “I can’t seem to keep you out like I can everyone else. That I think you could devastate me.”

— Jandy Nelson

283. “The coolest guys aren’t afraid to be feminists.”

— Jandy Nelson

284. “No one’s like you, for me.”

— Jandy Nelson

285. “I could step out of this sad life like it’s an old sorry dress.”

— Jandy Nelson

286. “Male leads in love stories need to be devoted, need to chase trains, cross continents, give up fortunes and thrones, defy convention, face prosecution, take apart rooms and break the backs of angels, sketch the beloved all over the cement walls of their studios, build sculptures as homages. They don’t flirt shamelessly with the likes of me when they have Transylvanian girlfriends. What an effing jerk.”

— Jandy Nelson

287. “I’m only two hours thrity-seven minutes and thirteen seconds younger than Jude, but she always makes me feel like I’m her little brother.”

— Jandy Nelson

288. “We hold on to each other so tightly under the sad, starless sky that for a moment I feel as if our heartbreak were one instead of two.”

— Jandy Nelson

289. “I don’t know how the heart withstands it.”

— Jandy Nelson

290. “I’ve forgotten quite how luminous he is, like another species of human that doesn’t have blood but light running through their veins.”

— Jandy Nelson

291. “What am I doing? Well, I’m doing it.”

— Jandy Nelson

292. “I look into his sorrowless eyes and a door in my heart blows open. And when we kiss, i see that on the other side of that door is sky.”

— Jandy Nelson

293. “For days and days, the rain beat its fists on the roof of our house – evidence of the terrible mistake God had made. Each morning, when I woke I listened for the tireless pounding, looked at the drear through the window and was relieved that at least the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us.”

— Jandy Nelson

294. “I, however, am a different story. I have not taught in years. I will not. Probably not ever again.”

— Jandy Nelson

295. “My heart’s bigger than a blue whale’s, which needs its own parking spot.”

— Jandy Nelson

296. “Yes, so if God can have two tries, why not us? Or three or three hundred tries.”

— Jandy Nelson

297. “I think you might very well be the most eccentric person I’ve ever met.”

— Jandy Nelson

298. “Before they can grin there fake smiles, I mumble something about a toilet, laugh a second too late at some joke, and then, without looking back, I speed-walk to the house like someone whose heart isn’t shaking, whose eyes aren’t filling up, someone who doesn’t feel so sad.”

— Jandy Nelson

299. “The sky’s gone blue: azure, the ocean bluer: cerulean, the trees are swirls of every hella freaking green on earth and bright thick eggy yellow is spilling over everything. Awesome. Doomsday’s most definitely been cancelled. Landscape: When God Paints Outside The Lines.”

— Jandy Nelson

300. “It’s the easiest thing to be lost if you don’t want to be found.”

— Jandy Nelson