Quotes from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger ·  72 pages

Rating: (168.2K votes)


“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey



“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“She was not one for emptying her face of expression. ”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey



“You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. 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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“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!”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey



“Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect....

.... Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her caviling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again. But her voice picked up again, in spite of herself. "I don't mean there's anything horrible about him or anything like that. It's just that for four solid years I've kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know when they're going to be charming, I know when they're going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they're going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they're going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice--or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There's an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they've dropped his name—that he's a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible." She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers.

Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I'm sorry. I'm awful," she said. "I've just felt so destructive all week. It's awful, I'm horrible.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“[...] don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey



“Give me an honest con man any day.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. ”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey



“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“Oh, it's lovely to see you!' Franny said as the cab moved off. 'I've missed you.' The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


“You can't exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.”
― J.D. Salinger, quote from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey


Video

About the author

J.D. Salinger
Born place: in Manhattan, New York, The United States
Born date January 1, 1919
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on the cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the coral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from In Our Time


“Hadrian reeked of death. It wasn’t the sort of stench others could smell or that water could wash, but it lingered on him like sweat-saturated pores after a long night of drinking.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Tower


“In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement


“never see them again. Surely, a couple so young, so”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance


“It is finished. The tale is told truthfully, and truth is no heavier, no more beautiful than lies. Yet there is something that makes me love the truth, and that love made me wander and worry until the truth was given to you, like a gift. For this in the end is what we have. The love of something. Wild ponies. A kiss salted by tears. The scent of raspberry syrup in a bottle. Oranges. Two lost children who come to your house in the dark forest. There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again. The wheel turns. Blue above, green below, we wander a long way, but love is what the cup of our soul contains when we leave the world and the flesh. This we will drink forever. I know. I am Magda. I am the witch.”
― Louise Murphy, quote from The True Story of Hansel and Gretel


Interesting books

Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
(418.3K)
Moby Dick: or, the W...
by Herman Melville
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
(427)
Probability Theory:...
by E.T. Jaynes
The Grand Inquisitor
(3.9K)
The Grand Inquisitor
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
(2K)
Doing Good Better: H...
by William MacAskill
Destiny: Step into Your Purpose
(664)
Destiny: Step into Y...
by T.D. Jakes
Half Lost
(8.5K)
Half Lost
by Sally Green

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.