favorite quotes (books)

"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. 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 "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact. "

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's Awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the Opera."

"I thought I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn useless stupid conversations with anybody."

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

" I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not."

"All the kids kept trying to catch for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was afraid she would fall off the goddamn horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it."

"I gave her a good look. She didn't look like any dope to me. She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard she was the mother of. But you can't always tell — with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane."

"The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding."

"Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. . . . Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you."

"'Have you got any soul?' a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; Now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues."

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"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."

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"What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives."

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"A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You've got to kick off with a killer, to grab the attention. Then you've got to take it up a notch, or cool it off a notch…oh, there are a lot of rules."

"How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies."

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"A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down."

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"Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say."

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"That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish, and short."

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"When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier."

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"Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go."

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"A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool."

"There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while."

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"[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage."

"I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me."

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"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

"Independência é algo para bem poucos: é prerrogativa dos fortes. E quem procura ser independente sem ter a obrigação disso, ainda que com todo o direito, demonstra que provavelmente é não apenas forte, mas temerário além de qualquer medida. Ele penetra num labirinto, multiplica mil vezes os perigos que o viver já traz consigo; dos quais um dos maiores é que ninguém pode ver como e onde se extravia, se isola e é despedaçado por algum Minotauro da consciência."

"(...) e, se as dores do mundo fossem juntadas numa só, quem poderia ousar dizer que a visão dela nos iria necessariamente seduzir e obrigar à compaixão, e desse modo à duplicação da dor? O que serve de alimento ou de bálsamo para o tipo superior de homem, deve ser quase veneno para um tipo bem diverso e menor. As virtudes de um homem vulgar talvez significassem fraqueza e vício num filósofo; é possível que um homem de alta linhagem, acontecendo ele degenerar e sucumbir, só então adquirisse as qualidades que o levariam a ser venerado como um santo, no mundo inferior a que teria descido. Há livros que têm valor inverso para a alma e a saúde, a depender de quem os utiliza, se uma alma ignóbil, uma baixa força vital, ou uma superior e mais potente; no primeiro caso são livros perigosos, desagregadores, dissolventes, no outro são gritos de arauto, que incitam os mais valentes a mostrar o seu valor. Livros de todo mundo sempre são livros malcheirosos: o odor da gente pequena adere a eles. Ali onde o povo come e bebe, e mesmo onde venera, o ar costuma feder. Não se deve freqüentar igrejas, quando se deseja respirar ar puro."

"O amor a um único ser é uma barbaridade, pois é praticado às expensas de todos os outros. Também o amor a Deus."

"Quem se despreza ainda preza a si mesmo como desprezador."

"Induzir o próximo a ter boa opinião de você, e depois acreditar piamente nessa opinião: quem iguala as mulheres nessa arte?"

"Os homens de profunda tristeza se denunciam quando estão felizes: têm uma maneira de agarrar a felicidade, como se a quisessem esmagar e sufocar, por ciúme - eles sabem muito bem como ela escapa!"

"Somos punidos pelas nossas rejeições. Todo o impulso que esforçadamente asfixiamos fica a fermentar no nosso espírito, e envenena-nos. O corpo peca uma vez, e mais não precisa, pois a ação é um processo de purificação. E nada fica, a não ser a lembrança de um prazer, ou o luxo de um pesar. Ceder a uma tentação é a única maneira de nos libertarmos dela. Se lhe resistimos, a alma enlanguesce, adoece com as saudades de tudo o que a si mesma proíbe, e de desejo por tudo o que as suas leis monstruosas converteram em monstruosidade e ilegalidade. Diz-se que as grandes realizações deste mundo ocorrem no cérebro. É também no cérebro, e só aí, que ocorrem os grandes erros do mundo. E até o senhor, Mr. Gray, que se encontra na flor da juventude, viveu paixões que o atemorizaram, teve pensamentos que o apavoraram e, quer acordado, quer a dormir, teve sonhos tais, que a sua simples lembrança, fariam corar de vergonha..."