Archive for the 'quotes' Category

The bright spot in all of the sad news today about the passing of J. D. Salinger is all of the wonderful quotes from his work that people have shared today on Twitter and Facebook. It’s been a lovely tribute to a man whose writing continues to speak to readers of all ages.

In Salinger’s honor, here are a few of my favorite passages from one of my favorite authors:

Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth.
-Franny and Zooey, page 7 (this is one of my favorite lines in all of literature)

“You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”
-Franny and Zooey, page 198

A box of Louis Sherry candies – half empty, and with the unconsumed candies all more or less experimentally squeezed – was open on the coffee table, in front of the couch.
-Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, page 55

Anybody over the age of sixteen without an ulcer’s a goddam spy.
-Franny and Zooey, page 141

The best thing, though, about being in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.
-The Catcher in the Rye, page 121

I don’t suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in prose, and there isn’t a hell of a lot he can do about it.
-Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, page 187

Well, there were—or maybe there are—a number of dead people out there. (Laughs.) It’s a very crowded place. There is a Beethoven and a Shakespeare and a Hitler and an entire family out there. But, fortunately, you don’t have to go to heaven to talk to some of them. A lot of them have left us amazing things on paper, and so their lives persist here anyway. Wonderful words. Beautiful music. Stunning things that resonate.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Happy Pi day and Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

Douglas Adams, one of the most fantastic authors ever, would have been 57 today.

Here are some of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes:

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.”

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

A friend on Rory’s Book Club recently posted a quote from The History Boys, and reminded me of how much I love that particular quote. That got me thinking about all my favorite quotes about reading, so I decided to post a few of them here:

“The best moments in reading, are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
-The History Boys

“Every new search is a voyage to the indies, a quest for buried treasure, a journey to the end of a rainbow; and whether or not at the end there shall be turned up a pot of gold or merely a delightful volume, there are always wonders along the way.”
-Vincent Starrett

“Each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author’s description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they’ve met, read or seen before – far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader’s experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.”
-Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde

“Of course anyone who truly loves books buy more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
-David Quanimen

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Every November 11 I like to remember Kurt Vonnegut and his favorite holiday, Armistice Day.

I think this year I’d like to post one of my favorite parts of A Man Without a Country, which I try to live by (as corny as that sounds).

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So Happy Armistice Day everyone, and Happy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut.

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I re-read A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut on Sunday, and I had to laugh when I got to this part:

Joe, a young man from Pittsburg, came up to me with one request: “Please tell me it will all be okay.”

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” I said. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it Joe, you’ve got to be kind!”

During a campaign season with all together too many Joes, it was pleasant to encounter Vonnegut’s Joe. If only elections could be as straightforward as Vonnegut was.

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I re-read The Great Gatsby a few days ago, and fell in love with it all over again.

I don’t think there are many passages in any book more beautiful and incredible than this one:

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

-From The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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