Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I think about how Mom told Noah it was his responsibility to be true to his heart. Neither of us has been. Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard to know what that truth is?”

— Jandy Nelson

352. “I do not want to eat or drink, or I will lose the taste of you in my mouth, do not want to open my eyes if not to see you, do not want to breathe any air that you have not breathed.”

— Jandy Nelson

353. “Aber ich kann nicht. Ich bin kein Feigling mehr. Ich habe es satt, auf Pause gestellt zu sein, vergraben und versteckt, vor Angst erstarrt im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. Ich will mir keine Wiesen vorstellen, ich will durch sie hindurch laufen.”

— Jandy Nelson

354. “If I don’t talk about it, I can just pretend it didn’t happen.”

— Jandy Nelson

355. “Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a familiar house. I do recognize everything. I could find my way around in the dark.”

— Jandy Nelson

356. “I want to go!” I explode. “I don’t want a tamped-down spirit!” I realize these are the first words I’ve uttered outside my head this entire meal. Mom beams at me. He cant talk her out of this. There are no surftards there, I know it. Probably only kids whose blood glows. Only revolutionaries.”

— Jandy Nelson

357. “A leopard can’t change its spots, now can it?”

— Jandy Nelson

358. “There’s something going on in his face right now, something very bright trying to get out – a dam keeping back a wall of light. His soul might be a sun. I’ve never met anyone who had the sun for a soul.”

— Jandy Nelson

359. “Her smile grows bigger and more welcoming and I realize she’s misinterpreted my leap across the hall as excitement to see her when all I want is to protect the kissing guys from her, from the whole world.”

— Jandy Nelson

360. “Oh, all right,” she says, totally surprising me. “I’ll give you the sun.”

— Jandy Nelson

361. “I want to play How Would You Rather Die? instead of figuring out how to live. But I can’t. I’m over being a coward.”

— Jandy Nelson

362. “I start to think about all the things I haven’t said since Bailey died, all the words stowed deep in my heart, in our orange bedroom, all the words in the whole world that aren’t said after someone dies because they are too sad, too enraged, too devastated, too guilty, to come out – all of them begin to course inside me like a lunatic river.”

— Jandy Nelson

363. “So much love is filling my chest, it may explode.”

— Jandy Nelson

364. “Oh my, I totally get why King Edward VIII abdicated his throne for love. If I had a throne, I’d abdicate it just to relive the last three seconds.”

— Jandy Nelson

365. “Con la lluvia, llega el fin del mundo.”

— Jandy Nelson

366. “At the same time, we reach for each other and then we’re in each other’s arms, joined together, pressed together, but this time not kissing, not moving, just holding each other so tightly. Moments pass, lots and lots of them, with us holding on, it feels like for dear life, or maybe holding on to dear life. So dear.”

— Jandy Nelson

367. “Dearest, I have gone mad. I do not want to eat or drink, or I will lose the taste of you in my mouth, do not want to open my eyes if not to see you, do not want to breathe any air that you have not breathe, that has not been inside your body, deep inside your beautiful body. I must.”

— Jandy Nelson

368. “But it was all a ruse – we played so we could fall asleep in the same bed without having to ask, so we could wrap together like a braid, so while we slept our dreams could switch bodies.”

— Jandy Nelson

369. “They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all.”

— Jandy Nelson

370. “You can’t help who you love, can you?”

— Jandy Nelson

371. “She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I’ve even gotten to experience it.”

— Jandy Nelson

372. “His eyes are bright as the devil’s. “Say yes.”

— Jandy Nelson

373. “Me too.” I pick up a stick, start digging with it. “Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” 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

374. “She’s like a flower that talks – an evangelical daffodil.”

— Jandy Nelson

375. “We haven’t talked in five months and we both look like different people, but it’s the same, same, same.”

— Jandy Nelson

376. “Write your sins on apples still hanging on the tree; when they fall away so do your burdens.”

— Jandy Nelson

377. “I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.”

— Jandy Nelson

378. “How can love be such a wrecking ball?”

— Jandy Nelson

379. “And it’s like he’s melting into a puddle of himself.”

— Jandy Nelson

380. “What if as much as I fear having death as a shadow, I’m beginning to like how it quickens the pulse, not only mine, but the pulse of the whole world. I.”

— Jandy Nelson

381. “Heathcliff and Cathy, like Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet!”

— Jandy Nelson

382. “Het hart overmeestert het verstand. Hoop of angst overmeestert de rede.”

— Jandy Nelson

383. “Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the stroy of your life?”

— Jandy Nelson

384. “Forget shutters, if I could put the Great Wall of China around him and me, I would.”

— Jandy Nelson

385. “And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.”

— Jandy Nelson

386. “My first day back to school is just as I expect, the hall does a red sea part when I come in, conversations hush, eyes swim with nervous sympathy, and everyone stares as if I’m holding Bailey’s dead body in my arms, which I guess I am. Her death is all over me, I can feel it and everyone can see it, plain as a big black coat wrapped around me on a beautiful spring day.”

— Jandy Nelson

387. “Then our eyes meet and we both crack up like we’re made of the same air.”

— Jandy Nelson

388. “That’s when it occurs to me that maybe the rocks are weighing him down so he doesn’t rise into the air.”

— Jandy Nelson

389. “What’s up with the plant?” He points to the despairing Lennie houseplant in the middle of the table. It looks like it has leprosy. We all go silent, because what do we say about my doppelganger houseplant? “It’s Lennie, it’s dying, and frankly, we don’t know what to do about it,” Big booms with finality.”

— Jandy Nelson

390. “How can something this momentous be happening to me without her? And what about all the momentous things to come? How will I go through each and every one of them without her?”

— Jandy Nelson

391. “I break stick after stick, using each one down to the very nub, so it’s like the blackness is coming out of my finger, out of me, and onto the page.”

— Jandy Nelson

392. “He smiles wildly, looks like love itself stuffed into a pair of jeans, black T-shirt, and backward baseball cap.”

— Jandy Nelson

393. “I miss you, I tell her, I can’t stand that you’re going to miss so much. I don’t know how the heart withstands it.”

— Jandy Nelson

394. “I go up to The Sanctum and put on the most obnoxious head-banging punk music I have, a San Francisco band called Filth.”

— Jandy Nelson

395. “A sorrowing heart poisons recipes.”

— Jandy Nelson

396. “No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?”

— Jandy Nelson

397. “So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way. And some of us get to float around on one of them and call it home.”

— Jandy Nelson

398. “Y ahora hay caballos galopando dentro de ella. Los oigo.”

— Jandy Nelson

399. “I want to hurl a building at God.”

— Jandy Nelson

400. “I’m standing on my own head!”

— Jandy Nelson