1
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
2
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
3
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
4
And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.J.d. Salinger
5
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
6
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.J.d. Salinger
7
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.J.d. Salinger
8
But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.J.d. Salinger
9
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
10
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.J.d. Salinger
11
If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.J.d. Salinger
12
God almighty, Franny, " he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been.J.d. Salinger
13
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
14
This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.J.d. Salinger
15
We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I. I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-one-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible. I swear to you, I could murder them both without batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The great emancipators. My God. I can't even sit down to lunch with a man any more and hold up my end of a decent conversation. I either get so bored or so goddamn preachy that if the son of a bitch had any sense, he'd break his chair over my head .J.d. Salinger
16
As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.J.d. Salinger
17
She threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss–spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the follow-through, and with somewhat of a forehead-bumping aspect.J.d. Salinger
18
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.J.d. Salinger
19
She was not one for emptying her face of expression.J.d. Salinger
20
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
21
He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.J.d. Salinger
22
Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word.J.d. Salinger
23
We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.J.d. Salinger