Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Ninguna mujer se puede resistir a un hombre que alberga maremotos y terremotos bajo la piel.”

— Jandy Nelson

402. “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

403. “El amor hace y deshace. Atrae la dicha y la desdicha con igual intensidad.”

— Jandy Nelson

404. “This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once in thirteen years have we chosen differently. It’s always: two rocks, two papers, two scissors. When I don’t draw us like this, I draw us as half-people. The.”

— Jandy Nelson

405. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

407. “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

408. “I’ve disappeared, which is good really, because suddenly I don’t have a clue what to do with my face or body or smashed-up heart.”

— Jandy Nelson

409. “Las personas, cuando se enamoran, arden en llamas.”

— Jandy Nelson

410. “A sorrowing heart poisons recipes.”

— Jandy Nelson

411. “And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.”

— Jandy Nelson

412. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

415. “Was the sky always this shade of magenta?”

— Jandy Nelson

416. “I’m standing on my own head!”

— Jandy Nelson

417. “Then he bestows the final commandment onto me: Thou shalt remake the world.”

— Jandy Nelson

418. “I watch the vein in his neck pulse. I watch him convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. I watch him existing and existing and existing.”

— Jandy Nelson

419. “I’m so happy, I feel like I’m jumping on a trampoline, just boinging around inside myself.”

— Jandy Nelson

420. “Lots of questions go unanswered.”

— Jandy Nelson

421. “Beauty is God’s handwriting.”

— Jandy Nelson

422. “Man overboard,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms and we’re laughing and then the laughing dies out because who knew kissing could be like this, could so alter the landscape within, tipping over oceans, sending rivers up mountains, unpouring the rain.”

— Jandy Nelson

423. “I try to calm myself by counting his freckles to see if there are any that are new.”

— Jandy Nelson

424. “I’m over beign a coward. I’m sick of being on pause, of being buried and hidden, of being petrified, in both senses of the word.”

— Jandy Nelson

425. “I’m awake, I guess, and maybe that’s good, but it’s more complicated than that because now I’m someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time.”

— Jandy Nelson

426. “I did four pastel drawings from the permanent collection – a Chagall, a Franz Marc, and two Picassos. I picked those because I could tell the paintings were looking at me as hard as I was looking at them.”

— Jandy Nelson

427. “I held on to his arm, which was belted securely around me, feeling safe because Dad was in charge and it was his hand that pulled the sun up each morning and down at night.”

— Jandy Nelson

428. “Sometimes, I’d see Sarah and her mom share a look across a room and I’d want to heave myself over like a table.”

— Jandy Nelson

429. “Good. That is it. You will see with your hands, I promise you.”

— Jandy Nelson

430. “You hurt before you can be hurt.”

— Jandy Nelson

431. “Maybe you stomped it to nothing and now he’s hollow and empty, a shell with no turtle inside.”

— Jandy Nelson

432. “Grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us Grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping Grief is a house where no one can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out.”

— Jandy Nelson

433. “Love’s so complicated, Noah, isn’t it?” I.”

— Jandy Nelson

434. “I’ve never been to a party before, didn’t know it was like being miles and miles underground, where demons walk around with their hair on fire.”

— Jandy Nelson

435. “They’re my ladies,” she’d tell Bails and me. “Halfway between here and there.”

— Jandy Nelson

436. “See feel draw: One verb.”

— Jandy Nelson

437. “During the day, everyone talks in colors instead of sounds. It’s so quiet.”

— Jandy Nelson

438. “His eyes warm at that- it kills me. What are we going to do with all this love?”

— Jandy Nelson

439. “Most of the time people look less like you remember when you see them again. Not him. He’s shimmering in the air exactly like he’s been in my mind. He’s a light show.”

— Jandy Nelson

440. “There is the world, remade.”

— Jandy Nelson

441. “Real life blows. I’m allergic to it too.”

— Jandy Nelson

442. “And when you’re tired, you crawl into your flower and go to sleep. During the day, everyone talks in colors instead of sounds. It’s so quiet.”

— Jandy Nelson

443. “As I make my way back to the table, something becomes clear: 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 whole 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.”

— Jandy Nelson

444. “This boy beaming before me, however, seems to glow in a class all his own. He must be from a very friendly part of the Milky Way.”

— Jandy Nelson

445. “Que me das un miedo terrible. Que a ti no te puedo poner barreras como a todo el mundo. Que me aterra la posibilidad de que me rompas.”

— Jandy Nelson

446. “But I’m his son, his gargantuan son. I’m a whirling, ass-kicking Goliath, a typhoon wrapped in skin, and then I’m writhing and thrashing and trying to break free and they’re wrestling me back down, laughing and saying things like “what a crazy mother.”

— Jandy Nelson

447. “The stars have bewitched the sky of darkness.”

— Jandy Nelson

448. “Los actos de atrapar al vuelo, lanzar, patear y golpear me producen alergia en todas sus versiones.”

— Jandy Nelson

449. “I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something. Like kiss Brian. The idea snags me and then I can’t get out of it. I totally should’ve tried. But what if he’d punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d kissed me back? Because I’d catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.”

— Jandy Nelson

450. “What’s weird is that she looks like she’s in a windstorm all of a sudden. Her hair’s blowing and her dress is slightly billowing. I check under the table to see if there’s a vent or something, but there isn’t. See? Other mothers don’t have their own private weather. She’s smiling at us so warmly, like we’re puppies, and something catches in my chest.”

— Jandy Nelson