J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
"We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound."
23 Quotes
"Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word."
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me."
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"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, Franny and Zooey
"And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight."
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
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