Explore Quotes by Jandy Nelson

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 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.

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 do have a tendency to want to go back to school at all times in my life. Maybe I'll do the Ph.D. in art history when I'm 50, or maybe divinity school. I like teaching, too.

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.

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.

For me, there's nothing better than getting immersed in a sprawling, epic, multi-generational family saga, and 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most sprawling, epic, and multi-generational of them all.

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 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.

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.

When people fall in love, they burst into flames.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I can't shove the dark out of my way.

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.

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

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.

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