Franny and Zooey Quotes

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I respect.”

“If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer. ”

“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.”

“She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane’s hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. ”

“I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me.”

“Everything everybody does is so ... not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. ”

“You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge.”

“He tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.”

“It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.”

“I have no ... authority to be speaking up like a seer ... We’ve had enough seers in this family. ”

“You can’t exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.”

“The aim ... is to wake everybody up to the need and benefits of saying the Jesus Prayer.”

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting”

“There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms. ”

″ Franny literally jumped ... ‘What book?’ she said. ‘This, you mean?’

“That little book she carried all around the whole house ... is at the whole root of this whole business. ”

“And I can’t be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”

“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete - that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”