I'm not trying to tell you, he said, that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world...[however,] they have more humility than the scholarly thinker.
I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall...
I know this much, is all, Franny said. 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 t...
I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one.
Hi,' he said. He always said it like he was terrifically bored or terrifically tired. He didn't want you to think he was visiting you or anything. He wanted you to think he'd come in by mistake, for G...
He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.
He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.
Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.
Franny was among the first of the girls to get off the train, from a car at the far, northern end of the platform. Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with hi...
Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was hom...
Every tune I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd eve...
Did anybody say anything about being flawless? Perfection isan absolutely different word, magnificently left hanging for the human being’s kind benefit throughout the ages!
Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the anno...
And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true. I don't g...
And I hate to tell you... but I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in a school. You'll have to. You're a student—whether the idea appe...
Almost every damn school in the world gets out earlier for Christmas break than the school I go to.
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...
After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances. I may be an orange peel.
Something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing...
What gets me about D.B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That's what I can't understand. It had this g...