Jandy Nelson Quotes
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People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn't. It continues and is ever-changing.
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I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.
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I didn't know love felt like this, like turning into brightness.
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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.
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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.
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How can the word love, the word life, even fit in the mouth?
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When he plays all the flowers swap colors and years and decades and centuries of rain pour back into the sky
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[Lennie meets Joe - he works out that she was named after John Lennon] I nod. "Mom was a hippie." This is northern Northern California after all - the final frontier of freakerdom. Just in the eleventh grade we have a girl named Electricity, a guy named Magic Bus, and countless flowers: Tulip, Begonia, and Poppy - all parent-given-on-the-birth-certificate names. Tulip is a two-ton bruiser of a guy who would be the star of out football team if we were the kind of school that has optional morning meditation in the gym
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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.
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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
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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.
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... 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?
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Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.
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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.
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I can't shove the dark out of my way.
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Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don't know a damn thing.
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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.
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The Color Of Extraordinary.
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I could step out of this sad life like it's an old sorry dress.
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Who wants to know that the person you love and need the most can just vanish forever
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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.
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Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.
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Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.
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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.
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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!?
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I suddenly feel left out of a future that isn't even going to happen.
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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.
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I wish my shadow would get up and walk beside me.
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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.
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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.
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