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

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children...

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I'm sorry to bother you," she whispered. "When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can't help it.”
― Joe Hill, quote from 20th Century Ghosts

“State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.”
― Gilles Deleuze, quote from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Eres mía —gruñó—. Únicamente mía. Acepto todo lo que eres, y podemos estar juntos....
(...)
—Te haré muy feliz por lo que has dicho, Maravilla Alada-Zacharel & Annabelle”
― Gena Showalter, quote from Wicked Nights

“As his older sister, it was my job to lie to him in the name of easing his troubled mind.”
― Jennifer Bosworth, quote from Struck

Interesting books

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.