Jandy Nelson Quotes - Page 2

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

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

The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's as if someone vacuumed up the horizon while we were looking the other way.

This is it--what all the hoopla is about, what Wuthering Heights is about--it all boils down to this feeling rushing through me in this moment with Joe as our mouths refuse to part. Who knew all this time I was one kiss away from being Cathy and Juliet and Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Chatterley!?

But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?

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.

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.

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

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.

I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.

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.

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

Each time someone dies, a library burns.

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