I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it.' He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to … - J. D. Salinger
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I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it.' He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. 'As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure — or even intellectual treasure — and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.
Jerome David Salinger (1 January 1919 – 27 January 2010) was an American author, most famous for his novel The Catcher in the Rye.
Biography information from
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Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Photo by Lotte Jacobi, per a credit in the bottom-left corner of the original dust jacket's back cover. Published by Little, Brown and Company (Public domain / CC0)
Portrait from Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Photo by Lotte Jacobi, per a credit in the bottom-left corner of the original dust jacket's back cover. Published by Little, Brown and Company. Used under Public domain / CC0. Processed and styled by Quotewise.
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Zooey 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 good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.
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"I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect....
.... Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her caviling 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 when 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 backward 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 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 takes dope all the time, or something horrible." She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers.
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."
