I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it?
A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that’s about all.
I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.
Presently, some sort of fish was served to me on a plate with a small but noticeable trace of coagulated catsup along the border. Mme. Yoshoto asked me, in English – and her accent was unexpectedly charming – if I would prefer an egg, but I said, “Non, non, madame – merci!” I said I never ate eggs. M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper against my water glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate and I systematically swallowed in silence.
As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts.
She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell – with somebody’s mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.
She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst.
Si haces algo demasiado bien, o te andas con cuidado, o con el tiempo empiezas a querer lucirte y entonces ya no eres tan bueno.
She yelled ‘Good luck!’ at me the same way old Spencer did when I left Pencey. God, how I hate when somebody yells ‘Good luck!’ at me when I’m leaving somewhere. It’s depressing.
Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can’t imagine.
The mark of a mature man is not willing to die for a worthy cause, rather it’s willing to live for one.
I’m a condition, not a man.
What’re you majoring in?” I asked him. “Perverts?” I was only horsing around. “What’re you trying to be – funny?
Indeed, all forms of human folly and beastiality touch a very symphathetic chord within our breasts!
This is of unspeakable importance. Please send any books on the structure of the human heart that I have not read.
He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.
God, how I hate it when somebody yells “Good luck!” at me when I’m leaving somewhere. It’s depressing.
It’s just that if I’d had any guts at all, I wouldn’t have gone back to college at all this year. I don’t know. I mean it’s all the most incredible farce.
I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.
I’m way off. I’ll just ruin the whole weekend. Maybe there’s a trapdoor under my chair, and I’ll just disappear.