“This is what I want: I want to grab my brother's hand and run back thr...” — Jandy Nelson Quote

“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 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 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 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.”

“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.”

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

“...although the death of an old friend was agonizing, it could not compare to the pain of an old friend irrevocably changed. When he thought of how this person yet remained on the earth but could never return to the past; of how their deep emotion had decayed, how their shared path had split into two unlike roads, how his beloved had become his enemy -- that was a suffering that brought agony with each breath,”

“Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can -that’s what’s the most valuable.”

“Is time the wheel that turns, or the track it leaves behind?”

“You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?”

“Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours...”