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

“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

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“The renegade strand of hair nipped her eyes once more. With a swift, steady hand, Oscar pushed it away from her face. His fingertip left a trail of fire along her cheek. Camille reached up to help him tuck the strand back, and their fingers met. She knew for certain the flush had returned to her ears.
Oscar dropped his arm and walked to the rail, wrapping his strong hands around the carved wood.
“He is used to having things go his way,” Oscar said, his voice low and only for her ears. Camille moved to stand beside hm.
“Have you always done everything he’s asked of you?” She was cautious not to come off sounding snide.
His knuckles whitened as he gripped the rail tighter, as if to hold something back. Hold something in.
“No.”
She hadn’t expected him to give her an answer, and certainly not that one.
“No? I don’t believe it. What have you done that’s gone against his wishes?”
Oscar had been her father’s shadow since day one. He’d watched and obeyed William Rowen with the kind of devotion any eager apprentice would show his teacher.
Oscar had been staring at the water, at the mounting churn of the waves. Now he shifted his eyes to her and fixed her with a look so strong and deep, she felt helpless beneath it.
“He asked me to stop associating with you,” he answered, still hushed. Camille’s eyes watered with mortification and dread. Her father had spoken to Oscar, too. She wiped her sweaty palms on the hips of her trousers.
“But clearly,” Oscar continued, leaning toward her, “I didn’t listen.”
His gaze revolved out to the ocean again, releasing Camille. Air flowed back down her windpipe. This was beyond humiliation. Her father couldn’t do this. He couldn’t order people to stop speaking to her.
“Why not?” she asked, her breath uneven from a cross of fury and the steadfast way Oscar had looked at her. “He could fire you.”
He moved away from the rail.
“If he wants to fire me for speaking to you, for looking at you…” He turned back to her on his way to the quarterdeck and held her gaze again. “Then I’ll risk it.”
She watched in awe as Oscar took the helm from a sailor and placed himself behind the great spoked wheel. He’d risk everything he had to be able to speak with her, to just look at her. His bravery made her feel no taller than a hermit crab. She’d so quickly, dutifully, accepted her father’s request to set her focus solely on Randall. But she mattered to Oscar. She mattered, and that one truth made her wish she was brave enough to risk everything, too.”
― Angie Frazier, quote from Everlasting

“It wasn’t that she didn’t want to die. Nor was it that she wanted to live. She just didn’t want to give up.”
― Fuyumi Ono, quote from The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow

“No he probado la ejecución ni la reclusión perpetua, pero si se puede juzgar a priori, la pena de muerte, a mi juicio, es más moral y humana que la reclusión. La ejecución mata de golpe, mientras que la reclusión vitalicia lo hace lentamente. ¿Cuál de los verdugos es más humano? ¿El que lo mata a usted en pocos minutos o el que le quita la vida durante muchos años?”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Racconti

“Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems

“Neither could speak. It was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.”
― Katherine Rundell, quote from The Girl Savage

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