Quotes

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Wed, 30 Dec 1998 13:38:53 +1100

I know we all love Top Ten lists here at bananafish. On a similar note I
looked up Salinger in my New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations. It's very
strange - here, as elsewhere in the Dictionary, the quotes are worthy
enough but you get the impression the editors just let the book fall open
at a random page and picked a quote off it:

`Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know *where*
the hell you are. I keep making all these sex rules for myself and then I
break them right away.' (TCIR 9)

`They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors. It's hard to
explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I
mean, they were good, but they were *too* good (TCIR 17)

`The trouble with girls ...' (thence follows the thing about inferiority
complexes)

`Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus
*really* would have liked would be the guy that plays the kettle drums in
the orchestra.'

`For Esme, With Love and Squalor' (book title)

`Poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the only actionable one we can call
our own' (Seymour: An Introduction)

`A confessional passage has probably never been written taht didn't stink a
little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.' (S:AI)

`One of the thousand reasons I quit going to the theatre when I was about
twenty was that I resented like hell filing out of the theatre just bexause
some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain.' (S:AI)

The immediate and obvious question is: where are Franny and Zooey? Where
are the other Eight Stories? Naturally they can't have everything in it.
Still ... you'd think there would be more spectacular or memorable quotes
than these. For my money I'd go for the whole passage describing the
Ossenburger Wing at Pencey Prep. Shifting into second gear ... that, to
quote a phrase, kills me.

So the question is - what Salinger quote would you all choose to go in such
a book?

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest

(aside: speaking of Top 10 lists, I'm currently reading a book which
attempts to rank the 100 most influential women of all time. The Top 10
are, apparently, Eleanor Roosevelt - yes,above the Virgin Mary and Mother
Theresa, who doesn't even get a look in, and such - Marie Curie, Margaret
Sanger, Margaret Mead, Jane Addams, Mary Wollstonecraft snr, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton/Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and the Virgin Mary. You can find
Jane Austen at 13, George Eliot 27, Emily Dickinson 35, Virginia Woolf 37,
the Brontes 44 and 45, Sappho 61, Flannery O'Connor 80. Any comments on
this?)


Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest