Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic,

Lane, who knew Sorenson only slightly but had a vague, categorical aversion to his face and manner,

Lane looked faintly interrupted. “Why what?”

Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted—or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect—he began to massage the side of his face

“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.

“All I know is I’m losing my mind,” Franny said. “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.”

a svelte twilight soubrette,

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.

mercurially,

excelsior

progeny

reticent.

rancor.

tenable)

And at that instant, more than just mentionably, had Zooey seen her face, and particularly her eyes, he might have had a strong impulse, passing or not, to recall, or reconstruct, or reinflect the greater part of his share of the conversation that had passed between them—to temper it, to soften

portrait of spurious hesitancy

ingratiate

vacuously

ablutions

nonsequitur

perceptibly

impotent

grimly,

dour

incessantly.

captious.

even more heterogeneous overflow from less communal “annexes” of the apartment.

vaudevillian

inveterate

wistful admirer of the wall décor at Sardi’s theat...

in almost incestuously close juxtaposition,

cyclopean

fractious,

ostensibly