franny

• collegiately dogmatic
• and i love you to pieces, distraction, etc.
• constitutionally against strong, silent men
• had a vague, categorical aversion to his face and manner
• he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person (franny) herself
• a section man (14)
• do you have to be a goddamn bohemian type, or dead, for chrissake, to be a real poet?
• all but unqualified disaffection
• to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black
• i'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody
• nonphysical part of the heart, where the hindus say that atman resides

zooey

• healthy american expletive (god)
• for a point of objection, however eloquent
• an esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle
• the two dry islands of his knees
• an authentic espirit superimposed over his entire face
• campus-catalogue parlance
• and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die
• with all the nuances of characterization left out (on the ground that they're novelistic and unphotogenic)
• i feel that somewhere very near here -- the first house down maybe -- there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and i can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight
• i have almost no time to do any elective thinking
• that, and a haiku-style poem i found in the hotel room where seymour shot himself
  • the little girl on the plane / who turned her doll's head around / to look at me
• a state of pure consciousness - satori -
• seymour once said to me -- in a crosstown bus, of all places -- that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold
• his mother's voice - importunate, quasi-constructive
• christ lived on cheeseburgers and cokes
• turned around and looked at her not just with objective wonder at the rising of a truth, fragmentary or not, up through what often seemed to be an impenetrable mass of prejudices, cliches, and bromides. but with admiration, affection, and, not least, gratitude
• you can't live in this world with such strong likes and dislikes, mrs. glass said to the bathmat
• the four great vows (104)
• little informal visits with god
• intrinsically unlovely
• a docile lap-cat's repose
• but at least i had the pleasure of not hearing my own voice for a while
• as a simple matter of 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
• he had a theory, walt, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something god sticks on people who have the gall to accuse him of having created an ugly world
• mob of ignorant oafs with diplomas that are turned loose on the country every June
• how you can pray to a Jesus you don't even understand
• christ-consciousness (172)
• calisthenic-like swiftness
• the color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white - unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition
• irreproachably americanese figure
• he told me last night he once had a glass of ginger ale with jesus in the kitchen when he was 8 years old