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"You ought to go to a boy's school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques."
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"You ought to go to a boy's school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I went to a private arts school. We had to wear cloaks."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And then, when I started to school, I found out I couldn't talk."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In our school you were searched for guns and knifes on the way in and if you didn't have any, they gave you some."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I believe in myself as I look forward to graduating from Hamilton Heights High School in 1991."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We are already expected to be the goodie two shoes. I went through that during my junior high schools where I wasn't allowed to watch television. I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio."
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Personal Development
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"I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck."
Education
"She was not one for emptying her face of expression."
Expression
"When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."
Mortality
"You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."
Life
"He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor."
Humor
"But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written 'fuck you' on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them- all cockeyed naturally- what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it."
Protection
"Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them... You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring."
Society
"I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though..."What the hellya reading?""Goddamn book."He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name on it. "Any good?" he said."This sentence I'm reading is terrific."
Reading
"I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
Personal
"I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal."
Morality
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