But what I don’t like — and what I don’t think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact — is the way you talk about all these … - J. D. Salinger

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But what I don’t like — and what I don’t think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact — is the way you talk about all these people. I mean you don’t just despise what they represent — you despise them. It’s too damn personal, Franny. I mean it. You get a real little homicidal glint in your eye when you talk about this Tupper, for instance. All this business about his going into the men’s room to muss his hair before he comes in to class. All that. He probably does — it goes with everything else you’ve told me about him. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But it’s none of your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour. But when you tell me about it — and I’m not fooling, now — you tell me about it as though his hair was a goddamn personal enemy of yours. That is not right — and you know it. If you’re going to to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl — because the enemy’s there, and not because you don’t like his hairdo or his goddam necktie.

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About J. D. Salinger

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 Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: Jerome David Salinger
Alternative Names: Jerome Salinger

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We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

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Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

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