"Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said."

"One of the few things left in the world, aside from the world itself, that sadden me every day is an awareness that you get upset if Boo Boo or Walt tells you you're saying something that sounds like me. You sort of take it as an accusation of piracy, a little slam at your individuality. Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose... For us, doesn't each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another's jokes, talents, idiocies?"

"Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?"

"Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word."

"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. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started..."

"When I really worry about something, I don t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don t go. I m too worried to go. I don t want to interrupt my worrying to go."

"Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody."

"People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,...,and he had very red hair."

"Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy."

"I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something."

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."

"I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human consciousness."

"Who wants flowers when youre dead? nobody."

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."

"I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas."

"John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on."

"It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true."

"I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I'll watch for that book."

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?"

"He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were."

"This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one."

"She gave me a pain in the ass, but she was very good looking."

"If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?"

"That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace."

"But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me."

"I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . 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. . . . So they gave up looking."

"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."

"He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving."

"All mothers are slightly insane."

"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that."

"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 bottom. He just keeps falling and 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. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."

"I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you."

"I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it. I can't always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down."

"I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with - which, unfortunately, is rarely the case-tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important-nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker."

"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."

"God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been."

"As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that."

"I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."

"Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl."

"She was around ten minutes late, as a matter of fact. I didn't give a damn, though. All that crap they have in cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post and all, showing guys on street corners looking sore as hell because their dates are late - that's bunk. If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody."

"Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason, Oh dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You're a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I'm feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I'd give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart."

"The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding."

"A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about all."

"I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while-just once in a while-there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!"

"Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone."

"I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face."

"The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly."

"I took her dress over to the closet and hung it up. It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up. I thought of her going in a store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably just thought she was a regular girl when she bought it. It made me feel sad as hell- I don't know why exactly."

"I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something."