Jandy Nelson Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

I suddenly feel left out of a future that isn't even going to happen.

Jandy Nelson
My grandmother thinks it's really funny to put all sorts of things in our - my lunch. I never know what'll be inside: e.e. cummings, flower petals, a handful of buttons. She seems to have lost sight of the original purpose of the brown bag." - Lennie "Or maybe she thinks other forms of nourishment are more important." - Joe

Jandy Nelson
Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of peopleMaybe 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
I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.

Jandy Nelson
Every available inch of his face busts into a smile - whoa. Has he blown into our school on a gust of wind from another world? The guy looks unabashedly jack-o'-lantern happy, which couldn't be more foreign to the sullen demeanor most of us strove to perfect.

Jandy Nelson
I've no use for talking, would just as soon store paper clips in my mouth.

Jandy Nelson
I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.

Jandy Nelson
But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too. C'mon, Lennie, she used to say to me at least ten times a day. C'mon Len. And that makes me feel better, like it's her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.

Jandy Nelson
When he plays all the flowers swap colors and years and decades and centuries of rain pour back into the sky

Jandy Nelson
Let me just unsubscribe to my own mind already, because I don't get any of it.

Jandy Nelson
Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.

Jandy Nelson
The first thing I notice is the sky, so full of blue and the kind of brilliant white clouds that make you ecstatic to have eyes. Nothing can go wrong under this sky...

Jandy Nelson
I could step out of this sad life like it's an old sorry dress.

Jandy Nelson
At least, the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us.

Jandy Nelson
I'm layering away: sauce, noodles, I belong to you, cheese, sauce, my heart is yours, noodles, cheese, I hear your soul in your music, cheese, cheese, CHEESE...

Jandy Nelson
It's never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can't see them.

Jandy Nelson
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
In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I'm not.

Jandy Nelson
I didn't know love felt like this, like turning into brightness.

Jandy Nelson
People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn't. It continues and is ever-changing.

Jandy Nelson
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

Jandy Nelson
It's such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what's lost, but to be enchanted by what was.

Jandy Nelson
For the first time in our lives, I'm somewhere she can't find, and I don't have the map to give her that leads to me.

Jandy Nelson
Years ago, I was crashed in 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
Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn't know dreams could hide inside a person.

Jandy Nelson
My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.

Jandy Nelson
All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they're gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I'm watching it burn right to the ground.

Jandy Nelson
That's exactly it—I am crazy sad, and somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.

Jandy Nelson
He smiles and takes his index finger and presses it to my lips, leaves it there until my heart lands on Jupiter: three seconds, then removes it, and heads back into the living room. Whoa - well, that was either the dorkiest or sexiest moment of my life, and I'm voting for sexy on account of my standing here dumbstruck and giddy, wondering if he did kiss me after all.

Jandy Nelson
According to all the experts, it's time for me to talk about what I'm going through... I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

Jandy Nelson