Top 500 Jandy Nelson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “A sorrowing heart poisons recipes.”

— Jandy Nelson

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “And the right thing is turning our backs on what might be the love story of our lives? The right thing is denying destiny, denying all the forces that have conspired to bring us together, forces that have been at work for years now? No way.”

— Jandy Nelson

407. “Except don’t you need to be claimed to be a daughter? Don’t you need to be loved?”

— Jandy Nelson

408. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

411. “I’m standing on my own head!”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

413. “He didn’t know the moment he left in the morning, I’d go through the secret sketchpads he hid under his bed. It was like he’d discovered a whole new color spectrum. It was like he’d found another galaxy of imagery. It was like he’d replaced me.”

— Jandy Nelson

414. “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

415. “Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus, the thick sugary pine, aware of each breath I take, how each one keeps me in the world a few seconds longer. I taste the sweetness of the summer air on my tongue and want to just gulp and gulp and gulp it into my body – this living, breathing, heart-beating body of mine.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

417. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

421. “Es bastante aburrido, pero los jugadores, bueno, ya saben...”

— Jandy Nelson

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

425. “Ninguna mujer se puede resistir a un hombre que alberga maremotos y terremotos bajo la piel.”

— Jandy Nelson

426. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

428. “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

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

431. “Mom used to say when you look at art, it’s half seeing, half dreaming. Same with ghosts, maybe.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

433. “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

434. “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

435. “You’re the author of you own story.”

— Jandy Nelson

436. “That’s what happened to him then: love. Tragic, impossible love.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

439. “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

440. “Guillermo taps his foot impatiently. Oscar winks at me, sending my stomach on an elevator ride. “To be continued,” he says.”

— Jandy Nelson

441. “His nose is like a capsized ship, his mouth the size of three, his jaw and cheekbones hefty as armor, and his eyes are iridescent. His face is a room overstuffed with massive furniture.”

— Jandy Nelson

442. “There is the world, remade.”

— Jandy Nelson

443. “It’s amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.”

— Jandy Nelson

444. “English people are so not asshats! I’m going to move there. William Blake was English.”

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

447. “So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way.”

— Jandy Nelson

448. “She dies over and over again, all day long.”

— Jandy Nelson

449. “I was crashed un Gram’s garden and Big asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking up at the sky. he said ″ that’s a misconception, Lennie, the sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet″.”

— Jandy Nelson

450. “My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier.”

— Jandy Nelson