Jandy Nelson Quotes

Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

Each time someone dies, a library burns.

The. World. Is. Not. A. Safe. Place.

How can the word love, the word life, even fit in the mouth?

I can't shove the dark out of my way.

Life’s a freaking mess… there’s not one truth ever, just a 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.

How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?

How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?

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

The Color Of Extraordinary.

Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn't know dreams could hide inside a person.

... if you're someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time, aren't you also someone who knows the best thing can happen at any time too?

This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.

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

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

Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris.

This is what I want: I want to grab my brother’s hand and run back through time, losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.

Who wants to know that the person you love and need the most can just vanish forever

We wish with our hands, that's what we do as artists.

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

There once was a girl who found herself dead. She peered over the ledge of heaven and saw that back on earth her sister missed her too much, was way too sad, so she crossed some paths that would not have crossed, took some moments in her hand shook them up and spilled them like dice over the living world. It worked. The boy with the guitar collided with her sister. "There you go, Len," she whispered. "The rest is up to you.

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.

And then he smiles, and in all the places around the globe where it's night, day breaks.

Remember how it was when we kissed? Armfuls and armfuls of light thrown right at us. A rope dropping down from the sky. How can the word love and the word life even fit in the mouth?

When people fall in love, they burst into flames.

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

Music: what life, what living itself sounds like.

Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a house you've been in before - you will recognize the furniture, the pictures on the wall,the books on the shelves, the contents of drawers: You could find your way around in the dark if you had to.

We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles.

I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?

I don't know how the heart withstands it.

This is the secret I kept from you, Bails, from myself too: I think I liked that Mom was gone, that she could be anybody, anywhere, doing anything. I liked that she was our invention, a woman living on the last page of the story with only what we imagined spread out before her. I liked that she was ours, alone.

She's a sun-kissed beach girl who goes gothgrungepunkhippierockeremocoremetalfreakfashionistabraingeekboycrazyhiphoprastagirl to keep it under wraps.

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.

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.

Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don't know a damn thing.

It's time for second chances. It's time to remake the world.

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

He doesn't have to say it, i feel it too; it's not subtle - like every bell for miles and miles is ringing at once, loud and clanging, hungry ones and tiny, happy, chiming ones, all of them sounding off in this moment. I put my hands around his neck, pull him to me, and then he's kissing me hard and so deep, and i am flying, sailing, soaring.

And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?

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.

I gasp, because Isn't that just exactly what I've been doing too: writing poems and scattering them to the winds with the same hope as Gram that someone, someday, somewhere might understand who I am, who my sister was, and what happened to us.

The guy's life drunk, I think, makes Candide look like a sourpuss. Does he even know that death exists?

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.

I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I'm watching it burn right to the ground.

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.

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