I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, planets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we didn't have all summer long. I know absolutely how to kiss him too, how to make his whole body tremble just from biting his lip, how to make his whole body tremble just from biting his lip, how to make him moan right inside my mouth by whispering his name, how to make his head fall back, his spine arch, how to make him groan through his teeth.

— Jandy Nelson

Isn't that what I always think when I get The Poor Motherless Girl Look? Like I've been shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes.

— Jandy Nelson

I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. Furthermore, I tell you it is the only way.

— Jandy Nelson

It's like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can't believe when I touch things they don't blow to bits. I can't believe I was so way off. I thought, I don't know, I thought wrong.

— Jandy Nelson

It's okay to be addicted to beauty," Mom says, all dreamy. "Emerson said 'beauty is God's handwriting.

— Jandy Nelson

[Lennie meets Joe - he works out that she was named after John Lennon]I nod. "Mom was a hippie." This is northern California after all - the final frontier of freedom. 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 our football team if we were the kind of school that has optional morning meditation in the gym

— Jandy Nelson

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

— Jandy Nelson

Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: mess essentialism 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

Love does as it undoes. It goes after with equal tenacity: joy and heartbreak. Her happiness was his unhappiness and that's the unfair way it was.

— Jandy Nelson

Male leads in love stories need to be devoted, need to chase trains, cross continents, give up fortunes and thrones, defy convention, face prosecution, take apart rooms and break the backs of angels, sketch the beloved all over the cement walls of their studios, build sculptures as homages. They don't flirt shamelessly with the likes of me when they have Transylvanian girlfriends. What an effing jerk.

— Jandy Nelson