Favorite Quotes and Passages

Submitted by nyybella on Sat, 11/04/2006 - 02:22
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  • FRANNY AND ZOOEY - J. D. Salinger

  • "If I'd wanted this place to fill up with every fat Irish rose that passes by, I'd've said so."
  • - Zooey to Mrs. Glass

  • "You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled , what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and--well, we iron things out together, that's all."
  • - Zooey to Mrs. Glass

  • "If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that--and you do--and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers."
  • - Zooey to Franny

  • "He said he was - this is exactly what he said - he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son', and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you - that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! I could just spit! I could! It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something . . ."
  • - Franny to Zooey (posing as Buddy)

  • "Just get sick sometime and go visit yourself, and you'll find out how tactless you are! You're the most impossible person to have around when somebody's not feeling up to par that I've ever known in my life. If somebody just has a cold, even, you know what you do? You give them a dirty look every time you see them. You're absolutely the most unsympathetic person I've ever known."
  • - Franny to Zooey
  • LUCIA, LUCIA - Adriana Trigiani

  • "The wedding vows are a license to be a complete jerk, with full knowledge that the person you married has agreed, no matter how large a horse's ass you are, to stay by your side until death. A fool could tell you this is a bad deal."
  • - Delmarr to Ruth & Lucia

  • "Roberto is a man, and they always said it and I never believed it, but it's true - a man is forgiven. The girl is always at fault. Forever married. People say, 'Roberto did the right thing.' But that's not what they say about me. I'll never be able to make this right. Never. But Roberto already has. He married me, so his debt is cleared."
  • - Rosemary to Lucia
  • THE CATCHER IN THE RYE - J.D. Salinger

  • "I took a look out the window before I left the room, though, to see how all the perverts were doing, but they all had their shades down. They were the heighth of modesty in the morning."
  • - Holden

  • "'The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.'"
  • -Mr. Antolini to Holden, quoting Wilhelm Stekel

  • "While I was walking I passed these two guys that were unloading this big Christmas tree off a truck. One guy, kept saying to the other guy, 'Hold the sonunvabitch up! Hold it up, for Chrissake!' It certainly was a gorgeous way to talk about a Christmas tree."
  • - Holden

  • "I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say 'Holden Caulfield' on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'F*** you!' I'm positive, in fact."
  • - Holden
  • THE POSITION - Meg Wolitzer

  • "No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body - not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there."
  • THE HISTORY OF LOVE - Nicole Krauss

  • "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."

  • "If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less. It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood."
  • NIGHT - Elie Wiesel

  • "I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . ."
  • - Elie

  • "There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive."
  • - Prisoner in charge at Auschwitz to new prisoners

  • "Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time."
  • - Elie

  • "One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me."
  • - Eliezer
  • THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA - Ernest Hemingway

  • "Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."
  • - Santiago to Manolin

  • "Where did you wash? the boy thought. The village water supply was two streets down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket."
  • - Manolin

  • "He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought."
  • - Santiago

  • "But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck anymore. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready."
  • - Santiago

  • "Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what will he bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?"

  • "'Fish,' he said softly, aloud, 'I'll stay with you until I am dead.'"
  • - Santiago

  • "'Fish,' he said, 'I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.'"
  • - Santiago

  • "'Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' Then he added, 'Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is.'"
  • - Santiago

  • "This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel."
  • - Santiago

  • "'The fish is my friend too,' he said aloud. 'I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.'
  • Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.
  • Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity.
  • I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers."
  • - Santiago

  • "'But a man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'"
  • - Santiago
  • COMMON COURTESY - Judith Martin

  • "Nobody believes that the man who says, 'Look, lady, you wanted equality,' to explain why he won't give up his seat to a pregnant woman carrying three grocery bags, a briefcase, and a toddler is seized with the symbolism of idealism."

  • "One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges."

  • "Nowadays, we never allow ourselves the convenience of being temporarily unavailable, even to strangers. With telephone and beeper, people subject themselves to being instantly accessible to everyone at all times, and it is the person who refuses to be on call, rather than the importunate caller, who is considered rude."

  • "College women are typically given to declaring for one or the other (in my day, for marriage; now, generally, for careers), and only later finding to their surprise that they must cope with both--while their men may be trying to figure out how to get out of doing both."

  • "There was no singles problem until singles got so single-minded that they stopped wasting time with anyone ineligible. Before that, it was understood that one of society's main tasks was matchmaking. People with lifelong friendships and ties to local nonprofessional organizations did not have to fear that isolation would accompany retirement, old age, or losing a spouse. Overburdened householders could count on the assistance not only of their own extended families, but of the American tradition of neighborliness."

  • ". . . women were brought up to have only one set of manners. A woman was either a lady or she wasn't, and we all know what the latter meant. Not even momentary lapses were allowed; there is no female equivalent of the boys-will-be-boys concept."
  • GREAT FOLKTALES OF OLD IRELAND - compiled by Mary McGarry

  • "'The horsemen thatching the roof with feathers are a likeness of people who go forth into the world to seek riches and fortune. When they return their houses are bare, and so they go on for ever
  • 'The young man dragging up the trees to make a fire is a likeness of those who labour for others: much trouble they have, but they never warm themselves at the fire.
  • 'The three heads in the wells are three kinds of men. Some there are who give freely when they get freely; some who give freely though they get little; some who get much and give little--and they are the worst of the three...'"
  • - Mannanan to Cormac from the story "How Cormac MacArt went to Faery" (Joseph Jacobs)
  • TALK TO THE HAND - Lynne Truss

  • "...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it."

  • "Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon."

  • "Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, but the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala."

  • "...when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate - with quite elaborate behaviours = for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. 'Go ahead!' we say. 'Don't mind us! Oh look, here's a magazine I can read!' When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused and to restore good feeling."

  • "Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect."

  • "The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad."
  • PROCEDURES FOR UNDERGROUND - Margaret Atwood

  • "with shrunken fingers
  • we ate our oranges and bread,
  • shivering in the parked car;

  • though we know we had never
  • been there before,
  • we knew we had been there before."
  • -from "A Morning"

  • "Where do the words go
  • when we have said them?"
  • -from "The Small Cabin"
  • I SHALL NOT BE MOVED - Maya Angelou

  • " 3
  • I'm young as morning
  • and fresh as dew.
  • Everybody loves me
  • and so do you."
  • -from "Seven Women's Blessed Assurance"

  • "A certain person wondered why
  • a big strong girl like me
  • wouldn't keep a job
  • which paid a normal salary.
  • I took my time to lead her
  • and to read her every page.
  • Even minimal people
  • can't survive on minimal wage.

  • A certain person wondered why
  • I wait all week for you.
  • I didn't have the words
  • to describe just what you do.
  • I said you had the motion
  • of the ocean in your walk,
  • and when you solve my riddles
  • you don't even have to talk."
  • -"They Ask Why"
  • THE PRINCESS OF MANTUA - Marie Ferranti

  • "The gaze of others is quite without indulgence for our defects and that of Mantegna is pitiless. I am grateful to him. Harshness, in the realm of the arts, is a virtue, and it is sometimes a good thing to see oneself as one is. My stupor, however, comes from the fact that people recognise me where I myself seem to see a stranger. This leads one to meditate more deeply on the matter. Are they dwelling on my superficial appearance rather than on what I really am? Who can say?"
  • - Barbara of Brandenburg (in a letter to her cousin, Maria of Hohenzollern)
  • ON OLD AGE - Cicero

  • "For while we are enclosed in these confinements of the body, we perform as a kind of duty the heavy task of necessity; for the soul from heaven has been cast down from its dwelling on high and sunk, as it were, into the earth, a place just the opposite to godlike nature and eternity. But I believe that the immortal gods have sown souls in human bodies so there might exist beings to guard the world and after contemplating the order of heaven, might imitate it by their moderation and steadfastness in life."
  • THE PILOT'S WIFE - Anita Shreve

  • "And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty."
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD - Aldous Huxley

  • "'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.'

  • 'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

  • 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

  • 'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.

  • 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last."
  • THE TAO OF POOH - Benjamin Hoff

  • "The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can't save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly."

  • "The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try again and find that the same thing has happened. Each time the goal is reached, it becomes Not So Much Fun, and we're off to reach the next one, then the next one, then the next.

  • That doesn't mean that the goals we have don't count. They do, mostly because they cause us to go through the process and it's the process that makes us wise, happy, or whatever. If we do things in the wrong sort of way, it makes us miserable, angry, confused, and things like that. The goal has to be right for us, and it has to be beneficial, in order to ensure a beneficial process. But aside from that, it's really the process that's important."
  • A FEW FIGS FROM THISTLES - Edna St. Vincent Millay

  • "Was it for this I uttered prayers,
  • And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
  • That now, domestic as a plate,
  • I should retire at half-past eight?"
  • -"Grownup"
  • THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2002 - ed. Dave Eggers

  • "We tried to act familiar, which meant we couldn't ask the kind of questions that might have helped us figure each other out and year after year the distance grew."
  • -from "Blood Poison" by Heidi Jon Schmidt