Quotes from Jandy Nelson

I am insanely superstitious. All the woman in my family are, beginning with my grandmother, who would leave red ribbons under the beds and taught us how to find four-leaf clovers.

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.

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?

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It's definitely one of my greatest joys, and I'm a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.

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.

... 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?

Music: what life, what living itself sounds like.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Each time someone dies, a library burns.

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

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.

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

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

I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries.

I grew up with older brothers, adore them, can't imagine going through life without them, and I definitely think I draw on that love when I'm writing about siblings. It's so powerful, the jump-in-front-of-a-train-to-protect-them kind of love.

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

Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.

I was actually born in New York, and spent some of my childhood in Boston. But my family moved to San Diego when I was 12, and I went to high school here.

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