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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4141d6f | But most of all, above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew - knew - that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 100c19c | How do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| c1c5ce4 | Mother, darling, don't yell at me. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl." -- | J.D. Salinger | ||
| f5c4b44 | Sometimes I talk a little loud when I get excited. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 67fb9e0 | You're a very, very strange boy." "I know it", I said." | J.D. Salinger | ||
| b27763d | My lips were quivering slightly, like two fools. Ustnite mi potrepvakha kato dvama glupatsi. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 7adc254 | But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a goddam bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held my breath, for God's sake. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 30e257a | Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| dfcd871 | You never get to sit next to the window any more when you're married. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 14b2992 | These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing. | guys intellectual like running they-re thing unless whole you | J.D. Salinger | |
| da77119 | He didn't disagree with me, but he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one's own and others' weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the grounds that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of the Tao, and.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| b2ec43c | You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. | going start then there to want | J.D. Salinger | |
| ea781e0 | That's depressing, when somebody says "please" to you." | please says somebody to you | J.D. Salinger | |
| 23090c9 | I'm in the unique position of being able to call my brother, straight out, a non-stop talker - which is a pretty vile thing to call somebody, I think - and yet at the same time to sit back, rather, I'm afraid, like a type with both sleeves full of aces, and effortlessly remember a whole legion of mitigating factors (and 'mitigating' is hardly the word for it). I can condense them all into one: By the time Seymour was in mid-adolescence - si.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 99fb243 | but I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one. I think that if he titters at male writers who wear invisible skirts he does so at his eternal peril. I'll say no more on the subject. This is precisely the sort of confidence that can be easily and juicily Abused. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| c45fad8 | Samo ne mi se usmikhvai -- kaza Zui s raven glas i migom se ottegli. -- Siimor vse mi se usmikhvashe. Taia k'shcha e t'pkana s veseliatsi. "Just don't smile at me, please," Zooey said, evenly, and walked out of the vicinity. "Seymour was always doing that to me. This goddam house is lousy with smilers." | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 3b624a8 | I know this much, is all," Franny said. "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. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there." | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 1819538 | That's something else that gives me a royal pain. I mean if you're good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas. Stradlater was always doing that. He wanted you to think that the only reason he was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. | writing | J.D. Salinger | |
| 30e7b2b | A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 9aa278d | Hey, listen," I said. "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?" I realized it was only one chance in a million." -- | life | J.D. Salinger | |
| 1bf211b | something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing... | J.D. Salinger | ||
| 224099f | She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J.D. Salinger or the Unabomber. | Gail Honeyman | ||
| f05fb75 | However I have thought of you frequently and of the extremely pleasant afternoon we spent in each other's company on April 30, 1944 between 3:45 and 4:15 P. M. in case it slipped your mind. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| f26016c | I have a feeling that you're riding for some terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. This fall I think you're riding for--it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with... | intuitive perceptive | J.D. Salinger | |
| c5e09bf | Kimse beni tanimasin, ben kimseyi tanimayayim, bu yeterdi. Dusundum, sagir-dilsizmisim gibi numara yapardim. Boylece, hic kimseyle o salak konusmalari yapmak zorunda kalmazdim. Biri bana bir sey demek istediginde bir kagida yazar, bana uzatirdi. Bundan bir sure sonra sikilinca da, omrumun sonuna kadar insanlarla konusmaktan kurtulurdum. Herkes beni sagir-dilsiz herifin teki sanir, beni rahat birakirdi. ... Eger evlenmek filan istersem de gi.. | J.D. Salinger | ||
| b0f4394 | La vida es como una errata tipografica: constantemente estamos escribiendo y reescribiendo las cosas | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| ee46cf0 | I didn't know. All I know was that the sex was terrific. And that the hippie was cute. She loved sweet pickles. She liked the name Willie. She even liked Apocalypse Now. She was not a vegeterian. These were all on the plus side. But, once I introduced her to my friends, at the time, and they were all stuck-up asshole Lit majors and they made fun of her and she understoond what was going on and her eyes, usually blue, too blue, vacant, were .. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 696f23e | It's hard to feel sorry for someone who doesn't care." "Yeah?" I ask. "What do you care about? What makes you happy?" "Nothing. Nothing make me happy. I like nothing." | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 84a9635 | The litany of what I did want? To be challenged. To not live in the safety of my own little snow globe and be reassured by familiarity and surrounded by what made me comfortable and coddled me. To stand in other people's shoes and see how they saw the world--especially if they were outsiders and monsters and freaks who would lead me as far away as possible from whatever my comfort zone supposedly was--because I sensed I was that outsider, t.. | Bret Easton Ellis | ||
| 632e1dc | Thomas Moore said: "It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed." | Susannah Cahalan | ||
| 5b90436 | When a smoker says he wants to quit but can't, what he's really saying is, "I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal." To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c744df3 | Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a979ed3 | Not just Negroponte, who doesn't like to read, but even Birkerts, who thinks that history is ending, underestimates the instability of society and the unruly diversity of its members. The electronic apotheosis of mass culture has merely reconfirmed the elitism of literary reading, which was briefly obscured in the novel's heyday. I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so a.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| bb55c73 | Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was. This futility had let's call it a flavor. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 8d8b7dc | Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan.. | parents revelation symbolism | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 4aafbe0 | Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it's like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourse.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| b9e5ffb | Yeah, well, we're all grieving in our own way, obviously. It's just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars." He tried to meet her eyes, but she'd turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. "Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let's see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys--" He snapped his fingers. "Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 555a0a8 | P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. | self-knowledge stupidity | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 227f879 | She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 019361e | Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earne.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 93399fd | As she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| d6ba47f | Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 51c7732 | It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos- | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3afd8a7 | He had three ancient candy thermometers whose metal casings were shaped like fraternity paddles and whose nature it was to show no increase in temperature for several hours and the, and all at once and all together, to register temperatures at which fudge burned and toffee hardened like epoxy. | Jonathan Franzen |