bob > bob's Quotes

“I’m not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I believe I essentially remain what I have always been—a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood I don't dare go anywhere near the short story form. It eats up little fat undetached writers like me.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I privately say to you old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parenthesis: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off as bow-legged--buckle-legged--omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad street lamp with his thumb stuck out--poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”
― Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wanted you to see something about her—I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird