Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making.

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody

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

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.

“Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.”

is? Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.

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

you’ve sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes.

“You know, I’m the only one in this family who has no problems,” Zooey said. “And you know why? Because any time I’m feeling blue, or puzzled, what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and—well, we iron things out together, that’s all.”

Give me an honest con man any day.”

“You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes,” Mrs. Glass said to the bathmat,

“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 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.”

This goddam house is lousy with smilers.”

Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer’s a goddam spy.”

I wish to hell everybody’d go home. I’m sick to death of being the heavy in everybody’s life.

“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.

the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.”

I was once an Emotional Young Person Just Like Yourself.”

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.”

You think everybody’s made of iron or something.”

You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”