thank you for this

It definitely was a group effort that allowed me to read Franny and Zooey and I'm so grateful! FM1 and FM2 thank you for letting me borrow it and stay up all night reading. And thank you to someone else for encouraging me to finish. It was necessary.



FRANNY: "Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash."


ZOOEY: "The idea, really, is that sooner or later, completely on its own, the prayer moves from the lips and the head down to a center in the heart and becomes an automatic function in the person, right along with the heartbeat. And then, after a time, once the prayer is automatic in the heart, the person is supposed to enter into the so-called reality of things."

"In the first place, you're way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. We both are."

FRANNY: "I got the idea in my head that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping- and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge-when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway-is the worst of all. I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom."

ZOOEY: "The part that stumps me is that I can't see why anybody-unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim-would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls- but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that- but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God."