Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

“I do like him. I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

“Anyway. Just in case I forgot to mention it. I love you. Did I get around to mentioning that?”

They know from experience that I burst into tears at the first harsh or remonstrative word.

It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.

and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

wish to God I had some idea what will happen to you

and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

is beginning to drive me out of my seat. It seems terribly important to try, though.

Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness—satori—is to be with God before he said, Let there be light.

I just hope that one day—preferably when we’re both blind drunk—we can talk about it.

(Which would have been masochistic ecstasy for me, probably.)

S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons. In any case, for what little it’s worth,

please count on my affection and support, at whatever distance.

I’m scared. What’s happened to us? I can’t seem to find us anymore. I reach out and reach out and we’re just not there. I’m frightened. I’m a frightened child.

I hate this rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it.

If she’s determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn’t have it in peace.”

“This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts.

“I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window any more when you’re married.”

“I wish you’d learn to leave the goddam party when it’s over,”

I suppose I’ll like him for that till I die.

“I could happily lie down and die sometimes,” he said.

And the worst part was, I knew what a bore I was being, I knew how I was depressing people, or even hurting their feelings—but I just couldn’t stop! I just could not stop picking.

Because when I’m not thinking properly, I let my feelings about television and everything else get personal.

This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t.

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. You don’t face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing facts is what got you into this messy state of mind in the first place, and it can’t possibly get you out of it.”

above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew—knew—that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.