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.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Franny and Zooey - Pg 67
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)