Thursday, January 21, 2016
Franny and Zooey - Pg 199
"You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right---God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 199
"Ah, God, what's the use of talking? You had the exact same goddam freakish upbringing I did, and if you don't know by this time what kind of skull you want when you're dead, and what you have to do to earn it---I mean if you don't at least know by this time that if you're an actress you're supposed to act, then what's the use of talking?"
Franny and Zooey - Pg 199
"At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick's skull."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 198
"It's this business of disiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line---in one damn incarnation or another, if you like---you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 186
Although there was nothing markedly peculiar about her gait as she moved through the hall---she neither dallied nor quite hurried---she was nonetheless very peculiarly transformed as she moved. She appeared, vividly, to grow younger with each step. Possibly long halls, plus the aftereffects of tears, plus the ring of a telephone, plus the smell of fresh paint, plus newspapers underfoot---possibly the sum of all these things was equal, for her, to a new doll carriage.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Franny and Zooey - Pg 180
The room itself was what might be called the third master bedroom of the apartment, and was, by more or less traditional Manhattan apartment-house standards, both unsunny and unlarge.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 169
"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."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 154
"He had a theory, Walt, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 131
"First of all, he knows I don't drink. Second, he knows I was born in New York and that if there's one thing I can't stand it's atmosphere."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 125
"Whew." She squinted at the morning sunlight. "Why's it so sunny?" She only partly took in Zooey's presence. "Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 124
He wore a frown behind his cigar, as though the stunning lighting effects had been "created" by a stage director whose taste he considered more or less suspect.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 123
And here at the couch, it should be mentioned, the sun, for all its ungraciousness to the rest of the room, was behaving beautifully.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 68
Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 68
He said you were the only one who was biter 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. That may be truer than true. How can I know?
Franny and Zooey - Pg 67
Seymour once said to me---in a crosstown bus, of all places---that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 62
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.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 59
The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 51
His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like "the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 49
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.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 49
The youthful narrator remarks that everybody suspects himself of having at least one of the cardinal virtues, and he goes on to say that he thinks his, bless his heart, is honesty. Mine, I think, is that I know the difference between a mystical story and a love story.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 48
People are already shaking their heads over me, and any immediate further professional use on my part of the word "God," except as a familiar, healthy American expletive, will be taken---or, rather, confirmed---as the very worst kind of name-dropping and a sure sign that I'm going straight to the dogs.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 29
"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---it is, it is. I don't care what anybody says."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 28
"It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing their makeup all over the place, and then trying to be horribly natural and friendly when your friends came backstage to see you. I just hated myself...."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 26
"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."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 22
She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 22
Her extended fingers, though trembling, or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty.
Franny and Zooey - Pg 19
"If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake."
Franny and Zooey - Pg 7
Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.
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