Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.…

“I don’t mean there’s anything horrible about him or anything like that. It’s just that for four solid years I’ve kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know when they’re going to be charming, I know when they’re going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they’re going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they’re going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice—or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There’s an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they’ve dropped his name—that he’s a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible.”

It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

“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.”

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

“You might like this book,” she said suddenly. “It’s so simple, I mean.” “Sounds interesting. You don’t want your butter, do you?”

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

“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.”

“I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy,”

If you must know, I hate any kind of so-called creative type who gets on any kind of ship. I don’t give a goddam what his reasons are.

“In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.

“We’re freaks, that’s all.

We’re the Tattooed Lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed, too.”

I’m sick to death of being the heavy in everybody’s life.

“I could happily lie down and die sometimes,”

“God damn it,” he said, “there are nice things in the world—and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.

If you’re going to go on with this breakdown business, I wish to hell you’d go back to college to have it. Where you’re not the baby of the family. And where, God knows, nobody’ll have any urges to bring you any tangerines. And where you don’t keep your goddam tap shoes in the closet.”

If you’re going to go to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl—because the enemy’s there, and not because you don’t like his hairdo or his goddam necktie.”

The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”

There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?… Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”