Franny Zooey Quotes & Sayings

Watch for big problems. They disguise big opportunities. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

I just hope that one day - preferably when we're both blind drunk - we can talk about it. — J.D. Salinger

He talks and talks and talks. And if he isn't talking, he's smoking his smelly cigars all over the house. I'm so sick of the smell of cigar smoke I could just roll over and die."
"The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn't hold on to a cigar, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see our Zooey again."
There were several experienced verbal stunt pilots in the Glass family, but this last little remark perhaps Zooey alone was coordinated well enough to bring in safely over a telephone. Or so this narrator suggests. And Franny may have felt so, too. In any case, she suddenly knew that it was Zooey at the other end of the phone. — J.D. Salinger

Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger's Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, the sister gets in trouble and the brother comes to help her out. But I wanted to make sure that in my novel the sister had more to do than lie around on a sofa muttering, which is what Franny does for two-thirds of Salinger's novel. — K.M. Soehnlein

I'd always tell my mom, 'I want to be famous like Claudia Schiffer or Brigitte Bardot.' — Charlotte McKinney

You've got a goddamn bug today - you know that? What the hell's the matter with you anyway?"
Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I'm sorry. I'm awful," she said. "I've just felt so destructive all week. It's awful. I'm horrible."
"Your letter didn't sound so goddamn destructive."
Franny nodded solemnly. She was looking at a little warm blotch of sunshine, about the size of a poker chip, on the tablecloth. "I had to strain to write it," she said. — J.D. Salinger

I'm sick to death of being the heavy in everybody's life. — J.D. Salinger

Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted-or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect-he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye. — J.D. Salinger

It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl - somebody in my dorm, for example, - he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. 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 as everybody else, only in a different way. — J.D. Salinger

Lillian shut her eyes briefly, as if she hoped when she opened them she would behold a world in which people never said ridiculous things. — Sarah Rees Brennan

The mountains are as I have always remembered them, the first light of the morning melting down their flanks. — Tan Twan Eng

I make everybody feel that he doesn't really want to do any good work but that he just wants to get work done that will be thought good by everyone he knows ... — J.D. Salinger

Mrs. Glass watched him pull it on. She didn't stay for the tying of the lace, however.
Instead, she left the room. — J.D. Salinger

For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately. — J.D. Salinger

If you start to feel old - start working with young people. — John Whitaker

Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect. — J.D. Salinger

In a matter of only a few seconds, in fact, her eyes appeared to jettison everything that was dark and heavy and to glow with fan-club appreciation. — J.D. Salinger