Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “She mesmerized lecture halls of students with her drama and passion, with ideas critics called daring and groundbreaking.”

— Jandy Nelson

352. “Life is contradiction.”

— Jandy Nelson

353. “I understand. Not the circumstances, but the shame. I understand the quicksand of shame.”

— Jandy Nelson

354. “I look up at the warmth in his face and smile at him. I think he could make me smile even while I was hanging at the gallows.”

— Jandy Nelson

355. “Per your request and his, this is how it’s going to be from now on. When I want to ask you to abandoned buildings or kiss those lips of yours or stare into your otherworldly eyes or imagine what you look like under all those baggy drab clothes you’re always hiding in or ravish you on some grimy floor like I’m desperate to this very minute, I’ll just bugger off on my Hippity Hop. Deal?”

— Jandy Nelson

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

362. “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

363. “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

364. “To reverse destiny, stand in a field with a knife pointed in the direction of the wind.”

— Jandy Nelson

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

372. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

374. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

376. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

378. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

380. “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

381. “I watch him hypnotize the girls as he does the fruit in the trees, the clouds in the sky, as he did me.”

— Jandy Nelson

382. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

384. “Este secreto me hace sentir como si llevara ascuas en el interior del pecho.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

386. “There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds.”

— Jandy Nelson

387. “Then I lie down on my back on the spongy forest floor. I love doing this – giving it all up to the enormity of they sky, or to the ceiling if the need arises while I’m indoors.”

— Jandy Nelson

388. “They’re in love. Like black vultures. And termites. Yes, turtle doves and swans aren’t the only animals that mate for life. Ugly, toilet-licking termites and death-eating vultures do too.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

390. “It’s like finally going to confession only to find out the priest has earplugs in.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

392. “I want my sister. I want to hurl a building at God. I take a breath and exhale with enough force to blow the orange paint right off the walls.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

395. “As the days pass, Paige Walker’s love of lilacs and ability to boil water have the singular effect of washing sixteen years of myth right off of her.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

400. “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