Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

“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.”

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

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

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.

second. The feet were extraordinarily small, the ankles were still slender, and, perhaps most remarkable, the calves were still firm and evidently never had been knotty.

we are having a man moment . why are we discussing her legs and feet

it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.

“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 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!