Jandy Nelson

“They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.”

“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.”

“If she were drowning, I'd hold her head under”

“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.”

“Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs. Jude and me have one soul between us that we have to share: a tree with its leaves on fire. And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.”

“There once was a girl who found herself dead.She peered over the ledge of heavenand saw that back on earthher sister missed her too much,was way too sad,so she crossed some pathsthat would not have crossed,took some moments in her handshook them upand spilled them like diceover the living world.It worked.The boy with the guitar collidedwith her sister."There you go, Len," she whispered. "The rest is up to you.”

“I'm in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I've been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the branches with my pen, allowing my heart to break in private.”

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

“Good. That is it. You will see with your hands, I promise you.”

“I don't know how this can be but it can: A painting is both exactly rhe same and entirely different every single time you look at it.”

“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?”

“What if I'm in charge of my own damn light switch?”

“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?”

“What is bad for the heart is good for art.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nor that he's regarding my face with the same intensity I am his. We're two paintings staring at each other across a room.”

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

“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.”

“Everyone has always said I look like Bailey, but I don't.I have grey eyes to her green,an oval face to her heart-shaped one,I'm shorter, scrawnier, paler, flatter, plainer, tamer.All we shared is a madhouse of curlsthat I imprison in a ponytailwhile she let hers ravelike madnessaround her head.I don't sing in my sleepor eat the petals off flowersor run into the rain instead of out of it.I'm the unplugged-in one,the side-kick sister,tucked into a corner of her shadow.Boys followed her everywhere;they filled the booths at the restaurant where she waitressed,herded around her at the river.One day, I saw a boy come up behind herand pull a strand of her long hairI understood this-I felt the same way.In photographs of us together,she is always looking at the camera,and I am always looking at her.”