Book//mark – Franny and Zooey | J.D. Salinger, 1961

“I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself
and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God
I could meet somebody I could respect.”

“I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and
all if it doesn’t make you happy.”

“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”

“She was not one for emptying her face of expression. ”

“Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.”

“Bessie: ‘Why don’t you get married?’
Zooey: ‘I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the
window anymore when you’re married.”

“Let’s just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze
everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.”

“We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.”

“I just hope that one day–preferably when we’re both blind drunk–we can talk about it.”

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody
that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody
interesting. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong,
or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless
and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something
crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.”

“You don’t know how to talk to people you don’t like. Don’t love, really.
You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”

“In the first place, you’re way off when you start
railing at things and people instead of at yourself. ”

“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once
in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge
should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there
never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed
to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word ‘wisdom’ mentioned!”

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection,
and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”

“And I can’t be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”

“Listen, I don’t care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don’t
tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty. That’s my Achilles’ heel, and don’t you forget it.
To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset, and I’m limp, by God.
Anything. Peter Pan. Even before the curtain goes up at Peter Pan
I’m a goddamn puddle of tears.”

“The Great Gatsby’ […] was my ‘Tom Sawyer’ when I was twelve [….]”

“It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family,
including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.”

“He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink
somewhere are all either dead or unavailable.”

“You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze
in this goddam phenomenal world.”

“The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll’s head around
To look at me.”

“We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family
language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any
two points is a fullish circle.”

“Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.”

“Why’s it so sunny?” she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. “I bring the sun
wherever I go, buddy,” he said.”

 J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey, 1961