"Listen, don’t hate me because I can’t remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else and talk and dress like everybody else.’ Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her cavilling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again. But her voice picked up again, in spite of herself. ‘I don’t mean there’s anything horrible about him or anything like that. It’s just that for four solid years I’ve kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know that they’re going to be charming, I know when they’re going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they’re going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they’re going to pull up a chair and straddle it backwards and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice – or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There’s an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial tax bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they’ve dropped his name – that he’s a bastard or a nymphomaniac or take dope all the time, or something horrible.’ She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers and being careful not to look up and see Lane’s expression … ‘It isn’t just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness’ sake … 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 that 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."

"Something now—and briskly, if I can—about that subtitle, ‘An Introduction,’ up near the top of the marquee. My central character here… will be my late, eldest brother, Seymour Glass, who (and I think I’d prefer to say this in one obituary-like sentence), in 1948, at the age of thirty-one, while vacationing down in Florida with his wife, committed suicide. He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brothers and sisters in our somewhat outsized family. Surely, he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet…"

"Anyway,” she went on, “the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over again — you only have to just do it with your lips at first — then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook. I mean that’s the whole point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about."

"The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. 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 story, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart."

"If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry."

"Before announcing that he knows a girl like a book, a man had better make sure he has read to the bottom of the last page."

"Zooey was in dreamy top form. The announcer had them off on the subject of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike-meaning a long row of identical ‘development’ houses. Zooey said they were ‘nice.’ He said 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 goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look ‘very nice."

"You had the exact same goddam freakish upbringing I did, and if you don’t know by this time what kind of skull you want when you’re dead, and what you have to do to earn it — I mean if you don’t at least know by this time that if you’re an actress you’re supposed to act, then what’s the use of talking?"

"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."