Jandy Nelson > Quotes

“The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I wish my shadow would get up and walk beside me.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. 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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“There were once two sisters
who were not afriad of the dark
because the dark was full of the other's voice
across the room,
because even when the night was thick
and starless
they walked home together from the river
seeing who could last the longest
without turning on her flashlight,
not afraid
because sometimes in the pitch of night
they'd lie on their backs
in the middle of the path
and look up until the stars came back
and when they did,
they'd reach their arms up to touch them
and did.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“There once was a girl who found herself dead.
She peered over the ledge of heaven
and saw that back on earth
her sister missed her too much,
was way too sad,
so she crossed some paths
that would not have crossed,
took some moments in her hand
shook them up
and spilled them like dice
over the living world.
It worked.
The boy with the guitar collided
with her sister.
"There you go, Len," she whispered. "The rest is up to you.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“When he plays
all the flowers swap colors
and years and decades and centuries
of rain pour back into the sky”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“That's a misconception, Lennie. The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us

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

grief is a house where no on can protect you
where the younger sister
will grow older than the older one
where the doors
no longer let you in
or out”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Oh, God,’ he whispers, reaching his hand behind my neck and bringing my lips to his. ‘Let’s let the whole fucking world explode this time.’
And we do.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Each time someone dies, a library burns.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“The Color Of Extraordinary.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, 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. It's like the day Mr. James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, "That's it! That's it!" to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“... 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?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“He murmers into my hair, "Forget what I said earlier, let's stick with this, I might not survive anything more." I laugh. Then he jumps up, finds my wrists, and pins them over my head. "Yeah, right. Totally joking, I want to do everything with you, whenever you're ready, I'm the one, promise?" He's above me, batting and grinning like a total hooplehead.
"I promise," I say.
"Good. Glad that's decided." He raises an eyebrow. "I'm going to deflower you, John Lennon.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“It's such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what's lost, but to be enchanted by what was.”
― Jandy Nelson

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“The.
World.
Is.
Not.
A.
Safe.
Place.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Who wants to know that the person you love and need the most can just vanish forever”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I'd been making desicions for days.
I picked out the dress Bailey would wear forever-
a black slinky one- innapropriate- that she loved.
I chose a sweater to go over it, earrings, bracelet, necklace,
her most beloved strappy sandals.
I collected her makeup to give to the funeral director with a recent photo-
I thought it would be me that would dress her;
I didn't think a strange man should see her naked
touch her body
shave her legs
apply her lipstick
but that's what happened all the same.
I helped Gram pick out the casket,
the plot at the cemetery.
I changed a few lines
in the obituary that Big composed.
I wrote on a piece of paper what I thought
should go on the headstone.
I did all this without uttering a word.
Not one word, for days,
until I saw Bsiley before the funeral
and lost my mind.
I hadn't realized that when people say so-and-so
snapped
that's what actually happens-
I started shaking her-
I thought I could wake her up
and get her the hell out of that box.
When she didn't wake,
I screamed: Talk to me.
Big swooped me up in his arms,
carried me out of the room, the church,
into the slamming rain,
and down to the creek
where we sobbed together
under the black coat he held over our heads
to protect us from the weather.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling 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. You can tell your story any way you damn well please. It’s your solo.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Music: what life, what living itself sounds like.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I could step out of this sad life like it's an old sorry dress.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“The guy's life drunk, I think, makes Candide look like a sourpuss. Does he even know that death exists?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn't know dreams could hide inside a person.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“That's exactly it—I am crazy sad, and somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“He doesn’t have to say it, i feel it too; it’s not subtle - like every bell for miles and miles is ringing at once, loud and clanging, hungry ones and tiny, happy, chiming ones, all of them sounding off in this moment. I put my hands around his neck, pull him to me, and then he’s kissing me hard and so deep, and i am flying, sailing, soaring…”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. 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?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“[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”
― Jandy Nelson

“How can the word love, the word life, even fit in the mouth?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Later, as he plays and plays, as all the fog burns away, I think, he's right. That's exactly it--I am crazy sad, and somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Gram made me go to the doctor
to see if there was something wrong
with my heart.
After a bunch of tests, the doctor said:
Lennie, you lucked out.
I wanted to punch him in the face,
but instead I started to cry
in a drowning kind of way.
I couldn't believe
I had a lucky heart
when what I wanted
was the same kind of heart
as Bailey.
I didn't hear Gram come in,
or come up behind me,
just felt her arms slip around my shaking frame,
then the press of both her hands hard
against my chest, holding it all in,
holding me together.
Thank God she whispered,
before the doctor or I
could utter a word.
How could she possibly have known
that I'd gotten good news?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“The architecture
of my sister's thinking,
now phantom.
I fall
down stairs
that are nothing
but air.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“He's bent over the strings tuning his guitar with such passionate attention I almost feel I should look away but I can't. In fact I'm full on gawking wondering what it would be like to be cool and casual and fearless and passionate and so freaking alive just like he is- and for a split second I want to play with him. I want to disturb the birds. Later as he plays and plays as all the fog burns away I think he's right. That's exactly it- I am crazy sad and somewhere deep inside all I want is to fly.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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!?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“This is the secret I kept from you, Bails,
from myself too:
I think I liked that Mom was gone,
that she could be anybody,
anywhere,
doing anything.
I liked that she was our invention,
a woman living
on the last page of the story
with only what we imagined
spread out before her.
I liked that she was ours, alone.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“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 curls
that I imprison in a ponytail
while she let hers rave
like madness
around her head.
I don't sing in my sleep
or eat the petals off flowers
or 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 her
and pull a strand of her long hair
I 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.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere