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A Girl I Knew Quotes

20 of the best book quotes from A Girl I Knew
01
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“She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence.”
J. D. Salinger
author
A Girl I Knew
book
Leah
character
innocence
eyes
descriptions
concepts
02
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“Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance.”
03
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“At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. ”
04
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“I was always half-eaten away by the respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.”
05
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“When I looked at Leah again, her beauty seemed too great for the size of the room. The only way to make room for it was to speak of it.”
06
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“The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight.”
07
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“Maybe I just worried too much about things.”
08
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“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.”
09
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“I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago.”
10
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“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
11
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“I knew it would take a certain amount of deep, constructive brooding on my father’s part to figure out a way of getting me into the firm in broad daylight - I happened to give both his partners the willies on sight.”
12
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“Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.”
13
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“A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”
14
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“We just never said anything to each other. Over a period of four months, we must have talked for thirty or thirty-five evenings without saying a word.”
15
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“I was taken a little aback, four or five evenings later, when my father suddenly asked me at dinner how I would like to go to Europe to learn a couple of languages the firm could use. First to Vienna and then maybe to Paris, he said unelaborately.”
16
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“When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.”
17
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“There was something fantastic and extremely heady about seeing her standing in the pedestrian lobby of the Schwedenkino, and I readily gave up my place in the box-office queue to go to speak to her. But as I charged across the lobby toward her over a number of innocent feet, I saw that she was neither alone nor with a girl friend or someone old enough to be her father.”
18
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“I found out soon after we met that Leah’s father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. ”
19
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“I’ll never forget this time he wanted to do a portrait of me. He always used to say to me - serious as the devil, too - ‘Eddie, you’re not beautiful according to conventional standards, but there’s something in your face I wanna catch.’ Serious as the devil he’d say it, I mean. Well. I only posed for him this once.”
20
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“The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her.”

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