Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me.
If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the m...
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 think that one of these days, he said, you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there.
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 had a theory, Walt did, 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 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...
Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's neve...
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!
Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?'Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.
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...
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...
Something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing...