FRANNY AND ZOOEY - J.D. SALINGER

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.

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.