Jandy Nelson Quotes

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.

I wish my shadow would get up and walk beside me.

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?

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.

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

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.

There were once two sisters who were not afriad of the dark because the dark was full of the other's voice across the room, because even when the night was thick and starless they walked home together from the river seeing who could last the longest without turning on her flashlight, not afraid because sometimes in the pitch of night they'd lie on their backs in the middle of the path and look up until the stars came back and when they did, they'd reach their arms up to touch them and did.

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

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.

When people fall in love, they burst into flames.

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.

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.

... 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?

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

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

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.

Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.

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

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 on can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out

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.

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

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

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

What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens?

The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.

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

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

The architecture of my sister's thinking, now phantom. I fall down stairs that are nothing but air.

... 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.

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.

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.

No hot guys should be allowed to have an English accent and drive a motorcycle. Not to mention wear the leather jacket or sport the cool shades. Hot guys should be forced into footie pajamas.

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.

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

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

When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

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 Color Of Extraordinary.

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.