J.D. Salinger, Franny And Zooey Quotes

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

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.

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.

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

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.

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

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.

But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.

That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace.

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

Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word.