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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1722c38 | He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 298c3a1 | Christ, it's embarrassing--I start thinking about this goddam poem I sent her when we first started goin' around together. `Rose my color is. and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.' Christ, it's embarrassing--it used to remind me of her. She doesn't have green eyes--she has eyes like goddam sea shells, for Chrissake. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 0b7ead4 | You beautiful little moron. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 8d371e1 | An Aesthetic Saint | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 5ddfbac | New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. | new-york | J.D. Salinger | |
| d64cd1a | Then all of a sudden, this tear plopped down on the checkerboard. On one of the red squares - boy, I can still see it. She just rubbed it into the board with her finger. I don't know why, but it bothered hell out of me. So what I did was, I went over and made her move over on the glider so that I could sit down next to her - I practically sat down in her lap, as a matter of fact. Then she really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I .. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 0923cc2 | I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 0b10674 | I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something. | humour j-d-salinger | J.D. Salinger | |
| 96086e4 | And I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 0de8b9f | You know what the trouble with me is? I can never get really sexy--I mean really sexy--with a girl I don't like a lot. I mean I have to like her a lot. If I don't, I sort of lose my goddam desire for her and all. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 9e4460e | I don't want to scare you," he said, "but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause." | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 7fa5b3c | The connection was so bad, and I couldn't talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back 'What?' I've been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all [358] day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be l.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 6bd519f | What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagle's blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 5461976 | dstnh hrgz bh pyn nmy rsnd. rwy st khh m`mwl Sdysh r dr nqTh y jdhb w hnrmndnh qT` my khnd; khl hmh sh hmyn st. | story storytelling | J.D. Salinger | |
| cd7250a | I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face. | loneliness | J.D. Salinger | |
| 66dc146 | Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn't smell like anyplace else. I don't know what the hell it is. It isn't cauliflower and it isn't perfume--I don't know what the hell it is--but you always know you're home. | smell | J.D. Salinger | |
| a842b02 | New York is terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 47881f5 | strdlytr hmyshh z adm tqDy lTf bzrgy dsht. admhy khwshgl y admhyy khh khyl mykhnnd khyly zrngnd hmyshh z adm tqDy lTf bzrgy drnd. nh chwn bry khwdshn mymyrnd khyl mykhnnd dygrn hm bryshn mymyrnd | J.D. Salinger | ||
| bd7ddb9 | he is invariably a kind of super-size but unmistakably 'classical' neurotic, an aberrant who only occasionally, and never deeply, wishes to surrender his aberration; or, in English, a Sick Man who not at all seldom, though he's reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go of both his art and soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) wh.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| e8f6bc3 | No importa que la sensacion sea triste o hasta desagradable, pero cuando me voy de un sitio me gusta darme cuenta de que me marcho. Si no luego me da mas pena todavia. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| a1bc7dd | Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 954a873 | Thus for me, the principal meaning of being a Jew was something people reliably held against me, a barrier to overcome. | Scott Turow | ||
| 4838597 | Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. | literature reading words writing | Jonathan Franzen | |
| ea04963 | El amor consiste en una empatia ilimitada, surgida de lo que el corazon nos revela, que el otro es tan real como nosotros. Y por eso el amor, segun lo entiendo, siempre es concreto. Intentar amar a toda la humanidad puede ser una empresa loable, pero curiosamente se centra en uno mismo, en el bienestar moral y espiritual de uno mismo. Mientras que para amar a una persona concreta, e identificarse con sus esfuerzos y alegrias como si fueran .. | love | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 01fda8c | There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter-- to inflict that version of himself on other people-- was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him. He was also afraid that it mig.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a95d8c7 | She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be "beheaded" someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were "probably" dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore. She confided t.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| d8c654e | H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.] | mind simile | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 2f0cd8f | She'd listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 531ab35 | The guiding principle of Martin's personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he'd sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a62260c | Katz couldn't have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable ago, before the contours of his personality were fully set. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| afae2a3 | The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 27463b5 | Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to.. | life life-lesson science spiritual-insights war | Jonathan Franzen | |
| bc13ab4 | The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 5f84d7d | Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 43fc25d | For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 58ea13f | They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a36c042 | Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 8a8124a | It's something to be anxious about," Manley said, "if you want to be anxious about something." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 9145f5b | The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who'd been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony's tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He l.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f61068e | What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in | home | Jonathan Franzen | |
| bcefdaa | And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace. | books literature reading words | Jonathan Franzen | |
| dc14e40 | He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ac0f942 | You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade. | home professionalism | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 3266df7 | He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. | Jonathan Franzen |