“Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?”

“Mattie,” he said silently to no one in the room, “you’re a little girl. But nobody stays a little girl or a little boy long—take me, for instance. All of a sudden little girls wear lipstick, all of a sudden little boys shave and smoke. So it’s a quick business, being a kid. Today you’re ten years old, running to meet me in the snow, ready, so ready, to coast down Spring Street with me; tomorrow you’ll be twenty, with guys sitting in the living room waiting to take you out. All of a sudden you’ll have to tip porters, you’ll worry about expensive clothes, meet girls for lunch, wonder why you can’t find a guy who’s right for you. And that’s all as it should be. But my point, Mattie—if I have a point, Mattie—is this: kind of try to live up to the best that’s in you. If you give your word to people, let them know that they’re getting the word of the best. If you room with some dopey girl at college, try to make her less dopey. If you’re standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you’ve got a buck—but only if you can do it without patronizing her. That’s the trick, baby. I could tell you a lot, Mat, but I wouldn’t be sure that I’m right. You’re a little girl, but you understand me. You’re going to be smart when you grow up. But if you can’t be smart and a swell girl, too, then I don’t want to see you grow up. Be a swell girl, Mat.”

“But what I don’t like — and what I don’t think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact — is the way you talk about all these people. I mean you don’t just despise what they represent — you despise them. It’s too damn personal, Franny. I mean it. You get a real little homicidal glint in your eye when you talk about this Tupper, for instance. All this business about his going into the men’s room to muss his hair before he comes in to class. All that. He probably does — it goes with everything else you’ve told me about him. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But it’s none of your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour. But when you tell me about it — and I’m not fooling, now — you tell me about it as though his hair was a goddamn personal enemy of yours. That is not right — and you know it. If you’re going to to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl — because the enemy’s there, and not because you don’t like his hairdo or his goddam necktie.”

“Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.”

“Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don’t just go up to somebody and say, ‘You’re a terrific whistler.”

“Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.”

“You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled, what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and—well, we iron things out together, that's all.”