“No one was a stranger in that crowd. We had all heard FDR's "Fireside Chats" and Edward R. Murrow's "This is London," listened to H.V. Kaltenborn for the evening news, and watched the newsreels before the movies. We'd read Ernie Pyle's columns, planted victory gardens, written V mails, sent care packages, gathered phonograph records for the USO, given up nylon for parachutes, saved bacon grease for explosives, and turned in tin foil, saved from gum wrappers, for ammunition. Most of all, we'd prayed that our loved ones would be safe.”

“We all like to believe that we'd be brave. We'd be the hero in the movie, the one who sacrifices himself to save others, the one who does the right thing when the world around him is wrong. In the movie the right choice is clear. And we leave the theater feeling good about ourselves because we can say, Me, I'd do the right thing. No one says, Me, I'd be the coward. Me, I'd rat out my neighbor to save myself. But that's what people do, mostly”

“We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.”

“Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry rot and men with matches.”

“The trouble with most of us is that we'd rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”

“No, there wouldn't be," Holden said. "It'd be entirely different." Sally looked at him; he had contradicted her so quietly. "It wouldn't be the same at all. We'd have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We'd have to call up everyone and tell 'em goodbye and send 'em postcards. And I'd have to work at my father's and ride in Madison Avenue buses and read newspapers. We'd have to go to the Seventy-second Street all the time and see newsreels. Newsreels! There's always a dumb horse race and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship. You don't see what I mean at all." "Maybe I don't. Maybe you don't, either," Sally said. Holden stood up, with his skates swung over one shoulder. "You give me a royal pain," he announced quite dispassionately.”