“Give me an honest con man any day.”

“Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.”

“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”

“Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.”

“I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it.' He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. 'As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”

“I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces — a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast — could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second.”

“I could see my mother going in Spaulding's and asking the salesman a million dopy questions - and here I was getting the ax again. It mad me feel pretty sad. She bought me the wrong kind of skates - I wanted racing skates and she bought me hockey - but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”