Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

“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.

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

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.”

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.

“The Four Great Vows,” he said, and, with rancor, closed his eyes. “‘However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; however immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; however incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.’

“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 don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!

An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

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.”