The Catcher in the Rye - Pg 18

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours  and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. 

The Catcher in the Rye - Pg 8

He started going into this nodding routine. You never saw anybody nod as much in your life as old Spencer did. You never knew if he was nodding a lot because he was thinking and all, or just because he was a nice old guy that didn't know his ass from his elbow. 

The Catcher in the Rye - Pg 6

 I used to think about old Spencer quite a lot, and if you thought about him too much, you wondered what the heck he was still living for. I mean he was all stooped over, and he had very terrible posture, and in class, whenever he dropped a piece of chalk at the blackboard, some guy in the first row always had to get up and pick it up and hand it to him. That's awful, in my opinion. But if you thought about him just enough and not too much, you could figure it out that he wasn't doing to bad for himself. 

The Catcher in the Rye - Pg 5

 I don't even know what I was running for--I guess I just felt like it. After I got across the road, I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road. 

The Catcher in the Rye - Pg 4

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. i don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't you feel even worse. 

The Catcher in the Rye - Pg 3

I liked her. She had a big nose and her nails were all bitten down and bleedy-looking and she had on those damn falsies that point all over the place, but you felt sort of sorry for her. What I liked about her, she didn't give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. 

S. / SHIP OF THESEUS - DOUG DORST & J.J. ABRAMS

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 446

 Inside his head, the voices pulse with ancient agonies. This place must have been the site of unimaginable suffering, of hearts and souls and lives stolen from the people that these voices once were.*

*As I write this final note, sitting in the cramped and dusty office of Winged Shoes Press on New York's East 33rd street, it occurs to me that hearts and souls and lives can themselves be sites of unimaginable suffering.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 443

 "We will thrive as long as you, our valued customers--and yes, we value you, despite your repellence, for you are the providers of grandeur and ease, you are the brandy-drowned ortolans whose bones gloriously lacerate our gums, you are the soft, yielding flesh beneath our thrusting hips--as long as you value power and profits and political gamesmanship over the search for love and serenity, over the lives and the dignity of all (including and especially those who are not you and are not known to you), over calm acceptance of your place as one--just one!--tiny and finite arrangement of molecules in a vast universe... 

 We will thrive... for as long as you choose extraction over creation, as long as you mistake commerce for art and destruction for progress, as long as you remain drunk on the juice that issues from the crush of a thing or place or person. We will thrive as long as you conflate power with influence, primacy with honor, goal with purpose, duty with responsibility, for thus is our business...perpetuated...thus does it hum with ever greater velocity. Our fondest hope is to continue to exploit your toxic dreams and to do so limitlessly, for thus may we claim our prenegotiated percentage of your--and, in many cases, your adversary's--personal infinity."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 423

I haven't said this before but I've wanted to + now I want to say it all the time:I LOVE YOU.I love you on the page + I love you in the library + in the coffe shop + in the last row of the varsity. I love you here. I love you in negative space--ok, I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure it's true-- + I love who you have been + who you'll be. I should say this to you in person, and I'm going to--over + over--but I think I needed to say it here first. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 423

 And there they are: artist and muse, assassin and abettor, two bodies pulled into middle age and beyond, and--most truly--two individuals swallowing their uncertainties, standing and facing each other in underclothes that are in grave need of washing. This is who we are, he thinks, and she nods, even though this time he is certain he has said nothing aloud. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 419

 I keep wishing we could've told her that it was Vaclac, she was in love with Vaclav. And then I remember that it hadn't mattered to her for a long, long time. The love mattered--not the name, not the date, not the facts. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 416 - Filomela's Letter

 I will tell you what matters most... it is love. When you fall in love, friends, let yourself fall. It is my fondest wish that this note finds you both happy, healthy, and falling.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 411

 He hears the whispers of many thousands of restless souls and discerns the lost woman's voice among them. He listens to her closely, now not even daring to breathe, listens with the most intense concentration he can muster. He charms it upward from the surrounding din, brings it up to his ears until he can make out her words: les caves, les caves, il est dans les caves.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 407

 At first came the sorts of phrases and images and details and ideas and feelings he has come to expect over the years: orphans and refugees from his forgotten life, and companions from whatever state he'd find himself in at the moment when ink was spilling into the grooves etched by the nib.