text:
Hilary Duff

Hilary Duff (born September 28, 1987) is an American singer and actress. She has also written novels.

Quotes

 * Andre [Recke] and I and my mom worked very hard to really get good music that I related to and was age-appropriate for me and wasn't just cheesy pop stuff.
 * There are definitely people I respect and I love their music, but there was never really an artist that I said, "I want to be just like them, I love the way their career is going. I love their music." It wasn't really like that. I wanted to be like myself.
 * I love writing, but I feel like you need time to really get in touch with yourself to do that. On [Metamorphosis], I would have liked to have had more time to work with the writers [and] write some more of my own stuff. Hopefully I can do that on my second album.
 * Rosen, Craig. "Hilary Duff: A Performer's Metamorphosis". Billboard. January 26 2004. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On Metamorphosis (2003), her second album and first non-holiday album.

 * I actually didn't want to have control of the writing on my first album. To write, you have to have time to connect with yourself. I don't have that time right now, because I'm so busy.
 * Binelli, Mark. "Teenager of the Year". Rolling Stone. August 27 2003. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On Metamorphosis (2003).

 * "Come Clean" is obviously about a boy and a girl's relationship and it's just talking about how somebody thinks they're in the dark. She's tired of it and he's tired of it and they're coming clean, whether it means they're gonna be together or not. They're laying all the cards out on the table and coming out with everything that hasn't been said basically. The video really shows that she's kind of in this monotone mood throughout the whole thing. She doesn't show too much emotion except that she's waiting for this boy, this guy, to come. You can't tell when they're running toward each other if they're gonna kiss or they're gonna hug or they're gonna hit each other. It's a bunch of different emotions.
 * "Hilary Duff comes clean". News Times. January 21 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On "Come Clean", a song from Metamorphosis (2003).

 * Well, I'm not going to be singing about lollipops because I no longer relate to lollipops.
 * No, I don't do that [sing about sex]. My music isn't forward like that. It's not sexual the way Britney's music is sexual. She feels comfortable singing about that, and that's fine, but I just don't talk about that kind of stuff, sorry. I just don't.
 * ...I want the songs I sing to reflect that [I am a regular 16 year old]. Basically, I'm not Lizzie McGuire anymore.
 * Duerden, Nick. "The Golden Girl". Blender. October 2004. Retrieved October 25 2006.

 * Compared to the first album, when I wasn't confident enough to make suggestions, this time around, I was very involved. I worked with the songwriters, telling them what was happening in my life, and what I wanted to sing about. If I thought it needed to be more heavy, more rock, I said so. I feel that this record is so much more me. I can't wait for people to hear it.
 * Music is so personal to me. I can be myself, and say what I want to say. I feel I'm honest and don't try to hide things. But music enables people to learn about my personality, how I'm evolving. Even if I don't feel comfortable talking about something, I can feel comfortable expressing that same thing through my music.
 * "Hilary Duff comes to Manchester on Jan. 27". The Dover Community News. December 31 2004. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On the recording of Hilary Duff (2004), her third album and second non-holiday album.

 * What it talks about is stuff that I've gone through, like, in the past year, which is, you know, a lot, and some of it's good, and some of it's bad, and a lot of it's, like, a big learning experience. And I got to write a lot about that with people that I've worked with before, so I felt completely comfortable.
 * "Hilary Duff Says New Album Is More Personal". Yahoo! Music. September 27 2004. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On the album Hilary Duff (2004).

 * On the second album I worked with a lot of people that I worked with on the Metamorphosis album. And when I worked on Metamorphosis I was so nervous and shy about going into the studio and working with people, they eventually toward the end made me feel so comfortable and so secure with myself. I loved working with them. I have a great relationship with them. I talk to them [all the time]. When we started talking about the second album, I was like, "I want to work with all the same people." They knew what was going on in my life, what I was going through. I would call them and say, "I feel like this right now. I want a song about this..." I never really felt like I had enough time to write my whole album and I don't know if I'm secure enough with myself to do that. But I wrote three songs on the album, one I wrote with my sister. It's so personal and these people really got what I was going through and how I feel inside. I think that's what makes it good and that's what makes me relate to them.
 * Murray, Rebecca. "Hilary Duff Talks About 'Raise Your Voice'". About.com. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On Hilary Duff (2004).

 * So many people think that this album is showing a different side of me, but that's not really what it is. I think it's just more me this time because I got to really do it how I wanted to.
 * I love the song ["Haters"]. I wrote it, it was my idea. I think at the time I was feeling like I had to talk so much about my personal life because people make accusations and there are lies and rumors constantly. I think that song really just came to me because I was feeling like people are so negative. They love to read what's coming out next on Page Six [of the New York Post] and I just felt like it was appropriate. I also felt like normal girls could relate to that, what with school and how people backstab each other and talk bad about each other and how much petty stuff goes on.
 * Uh oh. I don't think that I can tell who it [the person "Mr. James Dean" references] is, but it was definitely an experience that I went through that was interesting and I learned a lot from that time in my life. I think the song is very funny when I think about it.
 * Goodman, Abbey. "Hilary Duff: The Nicest Brat". MTV News. November 12 2004. Retrieved October 27 2006.
 * On Hilary Duff (2004).

 * I love the song ["Weird"] too. It is really weird when you listen to the beat and the words. It's about someone that she's still obsessed with. And everything he does is like he says this, but he does this. And he does this but he says this. It's all twisted around and backwards. She's not really sure who he is or what he does, but she likes it.
 * "Hilary Duff comes clean". News Times. January 21 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On "Weird", a song from Hilary Duff (2004).

 * When you are under the control of a label, you don't always get to have the sound you like. If I could change it, I would, and it would sound [less pop]. My name is Hilary Duff, and I don't know why I don't get to make Hilary Duff music. I just have to get the freedom to do it, and during the show, I do get to do that: I get to throw away all of the CD stuff that has been mastered and sounds really pretty, and I get to sing live.
 * DeRogatis, Jim. "Is She for Real?". Chicago Sun-Times. July 19 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.

 * It's more like giving people a taste of what the tour will be like. It's getting people to hear the music to a different sound … We remixed some of the songs so they sound totally different. It's really energetic.
 * Pencek, David. "Duff does double-duty". Norwich Bulletin. July 21 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.
 * On the compilation album Most Wanted (2005), her fourth album.

 * My sister and I really showed an interest in [performing] and dedication, and [our mother] was like, 'How can I tell my kids no?' It's the same as kids that are going into sports. Parents support them and push them.
 * "HILARY DUFF SAD SHE MISSED OUT ON A NORMAL CHILDHOOD". TheHotHits.com. 25 October 2011. Archived from the original on February 17, 2012.

title: Hilary Duff


text:
Alex D. Linz

Alexander David "Alex" Linz (born 3 January 1989) is an American actor, film director, film producer, screenwriter and voice artist.

Article in Jewishjournal.com November 20, 2003

 * During one scene, I had to do a shooting drill. He put a psychological spin on it.
 * Of Lamont Carr, who was basketball coach for the film "Full-Court Miracle".

 * I was brought up in a very logical place," said Linz, who had his bar mitzvah at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. "But I think they would [happen].
 * His attitude to miracles.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Alex D. Linz


text:
The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is a novel by J. D. Salinger. It is narrated in the first-person by the protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

Chapter 1

 * If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

 * They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.

 * I got the ax. They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey. It has a very good academic rating, Pencey. It really does.

 * What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse.

 * It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

 * Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has.

 * They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all-I'm not saying that-but they're also touchy as hell.

Chapter 2

 * "Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules." "Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it." Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right — I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.

 * "I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."

 * I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head — the right side — is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

 * I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am — I really do — but people never notice it. People never notice anything.

 * I'll be all right. I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?

Chapter 3

 * 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. It's terrible.

 * 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. (Page 18).

 * This is a people shooting hat ... I shoot people in this hat.

Chapter 4

 * “I’m not in the mood right now,” I said. I wasn't, either. You have to be in the mood for those things. (Page 42)

Chapter 5

 * My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him.

 * I went over to my window and opened it and packed a snowball with my bare hands. The snow was very good for packing. I didn't throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed my mind. The car looked so nice and white. Then I started to throw it at a hydrant, but that looked too nice and white, too. Finally I didn't throw it at anything. All I did was close the window and walk around the room with the snowball, packing it harder. A little while later, I still had it with me when I and Brossard and Ackley got on the bus. The bus driver opened the doors and made me throw it out. I told him I wasn't going to chuck it at anybody, but he wouldn't believe me. People never believe you.

Chapter 8

 * 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 thing is, though, I liked old Morrow's mother. She was all right. pg 72

Chapter 10

 * That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.

Chapter 13

 * The thing is, most of the time when you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl — a girl that isn't a prostitute or anything, I mean — she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don't. I can't help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they're just scared as hell, or whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping.

 * I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about.

Chapter 14

 * In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive,okayyy t as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.
 * Holden here refers to the man possessed by "Legion" which Jesus casts out of him and into a herd of swine, in the Gospel of Mark, Ch. 5, Gospel of Luke, Ch. 8, and Gospel of Matthew, Ch. 8.

 * I remember I asked old Childs if he thought Judas, the one that betrayed Jesus and all, went to Hell after he committed suicide. Childs said certainly. That's exactly where I disagreed with him. I said I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. I still would, too, if I had a thousand bucks. I think any one of the Disciples would've sent him to Hell and all — and fast, too — but I'll bet anything Jesus didn't do it.

Chapter 15

 * Everything I had was bourgeois as hell. Even my fountain pen was bourgeois. He borrowed it off me all the time, but it was bourgeois anyway.

 * At first he only used to be kidding when he called my stuff bourgeois, and I didn't give a damn — it was sort of funny, in fact. Then, after a while, you could tell he wasn't kidding any more. The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs — if yours are really good ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do.

Chapter 16

 * The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

 * Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but it's too bad anyway.

Chapter 17

 * A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring.

 * I don't understand boring guys. I really don't.

 * I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. '''They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.

 * Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

 * If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

 * It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month club stick together.
 * On school

Chapter 18

 * The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they'll say he's conceited. Even smart girls do it.

 * 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.

 * "Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will."

Chapter 19

 * These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing. They always want you to shut up when they shut up, and go back to your room when they go back to their room. (Page 144)

Chapter 20

 * 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. (Page 155)

 * People never give your message to anybody.

Chapter 21

 * It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

m

Chapter 24

 * That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all. ... Oh, sure! I like somebody to stick to the point and all. But I don't like them to stick too much to the point. I don't know. I guess I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in Oral Expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time — I admit it. But there was this one boy, Richard Kinsella. He didn't stick to the point too much, and they were always yelling "Digression!" at him. It was terrible, because in the first place, he was a very nervous guy — I mean he was a very nervous guy — and his lips were always shaking whenever it was his time to make a speech, and you could hardly hear him if you were sitting way in the back of the room. When his lips sort of quit shaking a little bit, though, I liked his speeches better than anybody else's.... It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle. I mean it's dirty to keep yelling "Digression!" at him when he's all nice and excited. I don't know. It's hard to explain.

 * What I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes. What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice. You just didn't know this teacher, Mr. Vinson. He could drive you crazy sometimes, him and the goddam class. I mean he'd keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can't do that to. I mean you can't hardly ever simplify and unify something just because somebody wants you to.

 * I don't hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hated them once in a while — I admit it — but it doesn't last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn't see them, if they didn't come in the room, or if I didn't see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them.

 * The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
 * This is presented as a quotation of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, and has often been attributed to Salinger, but it may actually be a paraphrase of a statement of the German writer Otto Ludwig (1813-1865) which was itself quoted by Stekel in his writings: "The highest he could raise himself to was to die gloriously for something; now he rises to something greater: to live humbly for something."

 * 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.
 * Said by Mr. Antolini

Chapter 25

 * I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars. I didn't care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn't know me and I didn't know anybody. I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody'd think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they'd leave me alone.

 * 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.

 * Then the carrousel started, and I watched her go around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam 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, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

 * Then what she did — it damn near killed me — she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head.

 * My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.

Chapter 26

 * A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going to apply myself when I go back to school next September. It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.

 * D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn't know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. All I know about it is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Quotes about The Catcher in the Rye

 * Though movies (Taxi Driver for John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan), books (The Catcher in the Rye for Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s murderer) and songs (Helter Skelter” for Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind Charles Manson) may articulate specific criminals acts, they don’t inspire the person’s desire for violence. Science has proven that in numerous studies. It’s tempting to blame movies, video games and rap music because they often express humanity’s worst impulses, but impulses are not actions for most of us. And for the mentally ill seeking violence, anything can set them off. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel (involuntary celibate) who deliberately drove his van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, said he was motivated by his resentment toward women for having sexually rejected him in favor of giving “their love and affection to obnoxious brutes.” Should we then demand that studios producing romantic comedies and publishers of romance novels be shamed into contributing to anti-incel causes? The 2017 Las Vegas shooter killed 59 and injured 851 during a country music festival. Should country music bear some responsibility?
 * Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Why the 'Joker' Gun Violence Protests Miss the Mark”, Kareem on Hollywood & Politics, The Hollywood Reporter, (10/2/2019).

 * (Have you related to any other stories of children or adolescents, of young people growing up?) There was The Catcher in the Rye, the Diary of Ann Frank... Yes, actually I have, definitely...
 * Tsitsi Dangarembga in Talking with African Writers by Jane Wilkinson

 * (Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?) “The Catcher in the Rye.” I found it on my mother’s bookshelf. I knew nothing about it or its author, but my mind was blown after the very first page. I hadn’t known that a book could speak so directly to a reader. After that, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
 * Alice Hoffman Interview (2014)

 * I made it a point to read banned books, like “The Catcher in the Rye,” which led to counseling sessions with a youth minister, who told me such books would give me sinful feelings. That incident solidified feelings I have about the power of books and one’s helplessness without them.
 * Amy Tan interview (2013)

title: The Catcher in the Rye


text:
J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger (1 January 1919 – 27 January 2010) was an American author, most famous for his novel The Catcher in the Rye.
 * See also:
 * The Catcher in the Rye

Quotes

 * She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
 * A Girl I Knew (1948)

 * I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.
 * As quoted in The Twentieth Century (1972) by Caroline Farrar Ware, p. 429

 * I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.
 * Interview in The Baton Rouge Advocate (1980), as quoted in "J.D. Salinger, author of 'Catcher in the Rye,' dies" in The Washington Post (28 January 2010)

 * There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. ... It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. ... I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. ... I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
 * Statements to New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh, as quoted in Salinger : A Biography (2000) by Paul Alexander; also in If You Really Want to Hear About It : Writers on J.D. Salinger and His Work (2006) by Catherine Crawford.

 * There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.
 * On the main character in his novel The Catcher in the Rye, as quoted in Asks Appeals Court to Uphold Ban on ‘Catcher’ Sequel" in The New York Times (14 August 2009)

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 * All quotes are statements of Holden Caulfield unless otherwise noted. This is just a sample, for more from this work see: The Catcher in the Rye

 * Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

 * If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
 * Chapter 1, opening sentence

 * Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.
 * Chapter 1

 * Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. - Mr. Spencer
 * Chapter 2

 * 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.
 * Chapter 3

 * I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.
 * Chapter 9

 * I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.
 * Chapter 10

 * The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs - if yours are really good ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do. It's one of the reasons why I roomed with a stupid bastard like Stradlater. At least his suitcases were as good as mine.
 * Chapter 15

 * Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.
 * Chapter 17

 * Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.
 * Chapter 18

 * When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.

 * It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948)

 * "I never saw so many tigers."

"I beg your pardon?" said the woman. "I said I see you're looking at my feet". "I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor," said the woman, and faced the doors of the car. "If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don't be a God-damned sneak about it." "Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car. The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back. "I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the young man.
 * "I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when car was in motion.

Just Before the War with the Eskimos (1948)

 * Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

For Esmé — with Love and Squalor (1950)

 * He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.

 * I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing — perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist.

De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952)

 * The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

 * Everybody's a nun.

Teddy (1953)

 * Life is a gift horse in my opinion.

 * I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

 * "You love God, don't you?" Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. "Isn't that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock —"  "Yes, sure, I love Him. But I don't love Him sentimentally. He never said anybody had to love Him sentimentally," Teddy said. "If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable."

 * "You know Adam?" Teddy asked him."Do I know who?""Adam. In the Bible."Nicholson smiled. "Not personally," he said dryly.

Franny (1955)

 * Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong.

 * The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.
 * p. 1

 * It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

 * I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want — some bastard with wavy hair?
 * p. 19

 * Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it.  I'm sick of it.  I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
 * p. 30

Zooey (1957)

 * The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.

 * Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.

 * The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

 * You still can't love a Jesus as much as you'd like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done — and you know it. You're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being — even a Professor Tupper — is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.

 * 'Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside'', where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.

 * When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer — you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission.

 * I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.

 * I can't see why anybody — unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim — would even want to say a prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls — but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that — but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.

 * I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that — and you do — and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.

 * Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master — some guru, some holy man — to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?

 * "You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line — in one damn incarnation or another, if you like — you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to — be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to — there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world."

 * You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right — God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

 * Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again — all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and — I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.

 * I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

 * For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

Dedication

 * If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)

 * 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 lightbulbs.

 * Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her.

 * I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.

 * How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back "What?"

 * I'm a kind of a paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

 * The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth.

 * Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected — never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.

 * I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

 * Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

 * "Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it."

 * Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ((())).

 * I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.

 * I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

 * But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.

 * The hallmark, then, of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananda's terms; i.e, "See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk") — the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.

 * It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person — the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist — who can write a poem that is a poem.

 * Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.

 * The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

 * For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world — not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things — work out rather beautifully.

 * He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes — fools, no.

 * What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can't believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It's a prissy word invented by the clergy.

 * I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

 * If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.

 * I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

 * Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.

Disputed

 * The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
 * Quoted by Salinger as a statement of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel in The Catcher in the Rye, this has often been attributed to Salinger, and it may actually be a paraphrase by him of a statement of the German writer Otto Ludwig (1813-1865) which Stekel himself quotes in his writings:
 * Das Höchste, wozu er sich erheben konnte, war, für etwas rühmlich zu sterben; jetzt erhebt er sich zu dem Größern, für etwas ruhmlos zu leben.
 * The highest he could raise himself to was to die gloriously for something; now he rises to something greater: to live humbly for something.
 * Gedanken Otto Ludwigs : Aus seinem Nachlaß ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Cordelia Ludwig (1903), p. 10; this is quoted by Stekel in "Die Ausgänge der psychoanalytischen Kuren" in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse : Medizinische Monatsschrift für Seelenkunde (1913), p. 188, and in Das liebe Ich : Grundriss einer neuen Diätetik der Seele (1913), page 38.

Quotes about Salinger

 * Jesus, he has a helluva talent.
 * Ernest Hemingway: "Sonny: an Introduction" in Time Magazine (15 September 1961)

 * Nine Stories blew me away‚ I can still remember reading “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” for the first time, and just weeping with the poignancy...it changed me both spiritually and as a very young writer, because both the insight and the simplicity of the story were within my reach.
 * Anne Lamott interview quoted here

 * I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.
 * Mary McCarthy, commenting on Salinger and Franny and Zooey, interviewed by Elisabeth Sifton: "Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction" in The Paris Review, No. 27 (Winter-Spring 1962).

 * In the 60s I was a teenager. I liked Franny & Zooey, really everything by J.D. Salinger. I realized it was important who was talking. If you could tap into that you could get a flow going.
 * Eileen Myles interview quoted here

 * The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
 * John Updike, about Salinger, in a review of Franny and Zooey, published in Studies in J. D. Salinger : Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and other Fiction (1963) edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, p. 231; also quoted in The Christian Science Monitor (August 26, 1965) and Updike's Assorted Prose (1965).

Despite his reputation, Mr. Salinger “was not a recluse,” said Nancy Norwalk, a librarian at the Philip Read Memorial Library in Plainfield, which Mr. Salinger would frequent. “He was a towns-person.” And last week, after his death, his neighbors would not talk about him, reflecting what one called “the code of the hills.” “Nobody conspired to keep his privacy, but everyone kept his privacy — otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed here all these years,” said Sherry Boudro of nearby Windsor, Vt., who said her father, Paul Sayah, befriended Mr. Salinger in the 1970s. “This community saw him as a person, not just the author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ They respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.” The curious constantly descended on Cornish and the surrounding area, asking residents for directions to Mr. Salinger’s house. Instead of finding the home, interlopers would end up on a wild goose chase. How far afield the directions went “depended on how arrogant they were,” said Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store. Mr. Salinger, he said, “was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.”
 * Here Mr. Salinger was just Jerry, a quiet man who arrived early to church suppers, nodded hello while buying a newspaper at the general store and wrote a thank-you note to the fire department after it extinguished a blaze and helped save his papers and writings.
 * Katie Zezima, in "J. D. Salinger a Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors" in The New York Times (31 January 2010)

title: J. D. Salinger


text:
Sunday in the Park with George

Sunday in the Park with George, American musical

 * We lose things, and then we choose things, and there are Louies and there are Georges...well, Louies...and George. But George has George! And I need...someone!

 * Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother. Pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges-- is what is beautiful.

 * I want my glasses!

 * There are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world of ours - children and art.

 * I cannot divide my feelings up as neatly as you, and I am not hiding behind my canvas - I am living in it!

 * I am what I do. Which you knew. Which you always knew. What I thought you were a part of!

 * Stop worrying if your vision is new. Let others make that decision- they usually do.

 * Anything you do, let it it come from you--then it will be new.

 * White. A blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities. [last line]

Finishing the Hat

 * (George) Yes she looks for me. Good. Let her look for me to tell me why she left me. As I always knew she would. I had thought she understood. They have never understood and no reason that they should. But if anybody could. Finishing the hat, how you have to finish the hat. How you watch the rest of the world from a window while you finish the hat. Mapping out a sky. What, you feel like planning a sky? How you feel when voices that come through the window go until they distance and die. Until there's nothing but sky. And how you're always coming back too late from the grass or the stick or the dog or the light. How the kind of women willing to wait's not the kind that you want to find waiting to return you to the night. Dizzy from the height. Coming from the hat. Studying the hat. Entering the world of the hat. Reaching through the world of the hat like a window back to this one from that. Studying a face. Stepping back to look at a face leaves a little space in the way like a window. But to see, it's the only way to see. And when the woman that you wanted goes you can say to yourself "well, I give what I give," but the woman who won't wait for you knows that however you live there's a part of you always standing by, mapping out a sky. Finishing a hat. Starting on a hat. Finishing a hat. Look I made a hat...where there never was a hat!

title: Sunday in the Park with George


text:
User talk:147.8.44.10

Changed

It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, freedom, and incumbency."

to

"It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency."

title: User talk:147.8.44.10


text:
Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ἡράκλειτος, Herakleitos; c. 535 BC – 475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and for establishing the term Logos (λόγος) in Western philosophy as meaning both the source and fundamental order of the Cosmos.

Quotes

 * τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
 * All entities move and nothing remains still.
 * As quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 401d

 * πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει
 * Everything changes and nothing stands still.
 * As quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 402a
 * Variants and variant translations: Everything flows and nothing stays. Everything flows and nothing abides. Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. Everything flows; nothing remains. All is flux, nothing is stationary. All is flux, nothing stays still. All flows, nothing stays.
 * Πάντα ῥεῖ
 * Everything flows.
 * This statement occurs in Simplicius' Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, 1313.11; while some sources attribute to Simplicius the coining of the specific phrase "πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei)", meaning "everything flows/is in a state of flux", to characterize the concept in the philosophy of Heraclitus, the essential phrasing "everything changes" and variations on it, in contexts where Heraclitus's thought is being alluded to, was current in both Plato and Aristotle's writings.

 * δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.
 * You could not step twice into the same river.
 * As quoted in Plato, Cratylus, 402a

 * τὴν μεταβολὴν ὁδὸν ἄνω κάτω, τόν τε κόσμον γίνεσθαι κατ' αὐτήν.
 * Change he called a pathway up and down, and this determines the birth of the world.
 * From Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, section 8

 * αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη.
 * Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.
 * Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation of all heresies, IX, 9, 4 (Fragment 52), as translated in Reality (1994), by Carl Avren Levenson and Jonathan Westphal, p. 10
 * Variants:
 * The Cosmos is child's play: a child playing chess as King.
 * Using English idioms to parallel the original's wordplay.
 * History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.
 * A very free translation, as quoted in Contemporary Literature in Translation (1976), p. 21
 * A lifetime is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.
 * As quoted in The Beginning of All Wisdom: Timeless Advice from the Ancient Greeks (2003) by Steven Stavropoulos, p. 95
 * Time is a game played beautifully by children.
 * A free translation, as quoted in Fragments (2001) translated by Brooks Haxton
 * Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.
 * As quoted in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (1979) translated by Charles H. Kahn

 * χαλεπώτερον ἡδονῇ μάχεσθαι ἢ θυμῷ
 * It is harder to fight against pleasure than against anger.
 * As quoted by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, Book II (1105a)

 * χρὴ γὰρ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἴστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι
 * Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.
 * As quoted Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 140, 6 (Fragment 35)

 * Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.
 * War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.
 * War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free. (G. T. W. Patrick, 1889)
 * Hippolytus, Ref. haer. ix. 9 (Fragment 53). Context: "And that the father of all created things is created and uncreated, the made and the maker, we hear him (Heraclitus) saying, 'War is the father and king of all,' etc."
 * Plutarch, de Iside 48, p. 370. Context, see frag. 43.
 * Proclus in Tim. 54 A (comp. 24 B).
 * Compare Chrysippus from Philodem. P. eusebeias, vii. p. 81, Gomperz.
 * Lucianus, Quomodo hist. conscrib. 2; Idem, Icaromen 8.
 * See also: πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς
 * Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (1942–1943)
 * Τίς γὰρ αὐτῶν νόος ἢ φρήν; [δήμων] ἀοιδοῖσι ἕπονται καὶ διδασκάλῳ χρέωνται ὁμίλῳ, οὐκ εἰδότες ὅτι πολλοὶ κακοὶ ὀλίγοι δὲ ἀγαθοί. αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἓν ἀντία πάντων οἱ ἄριστοι, κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκόρηνται ὅκωσπερ κτήνεα.
 * The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.
 * For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all – immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle. (G.T.W. Patrick, 1889)
 * "The passage is restored as above by Bernays (Heraclitea i. p. 34), and Bywater (p. 43), from the following sources:
 * Clement of Alex. Strom. v. 9, p. 682.
 * Proclus in Alcib. p. 255 Creuzer, = 525 ed. Cous. ii.
 * Clement of Alex. Strom. iv. 7, p. 586."

 * Ten thousand do not turn the scale against a single man of worth.
 * in Eric Hoffer, Between the Devil and the Dragon (New York: 1982), p. 107

 * Greater fates gain greater rewards
 * As quoted by The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature; Translated from the Greek Text of Bywater, with an Introduction Historical and Critical, by G. T. W. Patrick. Page 108
 * Alternative translation: Big results require big ambitions.
 * The many are mean; only the few are noble.
 * in Eric Hoffer, Between the Devil and the Dragon (New York: 1982), p. 108

Numbered fragments

 * Different sources sometimes number many of these fragments of the expressions of Heraclitus differently.

 * τοῦ λόγου δ' ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
 * Though wisdom is common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.
 * Fragment 2, as quoted in Against the Mathematicians by Sextus Empiricus
 * Variant translation: So we must follow the common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

 * οὐ γὰρ φρονέουσι τοιαῦτα [οἱ] πολλοί, ὁκόσοι ἐγκυρεῦσιν, οὐδὲ μαθόντες γινώσκουσιν, ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι.
 * The majority of people have no understanding of the things with which they daily meet, nor, when instructed, do they have any right knowledge of them, although to themselves they seem to have.
 * Source: Clement, Stromates, II, 8, 1
 * Fragment 5, as translated by G. W. T. Patrick

 * συνάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα.
 * Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.
 * Fragment 10
 * Variant translation: From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.

 * ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.
 * Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.
 * Fragment 12

 * ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον, οὐκ ἐξευρήσει
 * He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored.
 * Fragment 18, as quoted in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments (1981) edited by Charles H. Kahn, p. 105
 * Variants:
 * He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it out.
 * The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments (1981) edited by Charles H. Kahn, p. 129
 * He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it, since it is trackless and unexplored.
 * As quoted in Helen by Euripides, edited by William Allan (2008), p. 278
 * Unless you expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hidden and thickly tangled.
 * Rendering ἐὰν μή "unless" is more English-friendly without being inaccurate. As for the last clause, the point is that you can neither find it nor navigate your way through it. The alpha-privatives suggest using similar metaphoric adjectives to keep the Greek 'feel.' (S. N. Jenks, 2014)

 * ἄνθρωπος ἐν εὐφρόνῃ φάος ἅπτεται ἑαυτῷ [ἀποθανὼν] ἀποσβεσθεὶς
 * Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.
 * Fragment 26

 * κόσμον τόνδε, τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν οὐτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ' ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα
 * This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.
 * Fragment 30
 * Variant translations: The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither gods nor men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished. This world . . . ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measure going out.
 * That which always was, and is, and will be everlasting fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away.
 * Translated by Brooks Haxton

 * ἓν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα
 * The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.
 * Fragment 32

 * πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει
 * Much learning does not teach understanding.
 * Fragment 40

 * μάχεσθαι χρὴ τὸν δῆμον ὑπὲρ τοῦ νόμου ὅκωσπερ τείχεος
 * The people must fight for its law as for its walls.
 * Fragment 44

 * B49a. potamois tois autois …
 * Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. (Heraclitus Homericus)
 * Fragment 49a.
 * Translated by Daniel W. Graham, "Heraclitus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), .

 * οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναί
 * It is wise to listen, not to me but to the Word, and to confess that all things are one.
 * Fragment 50, as translated in the Loeb Classics edition
 * Variant translations: Listening not to me but to reason, it is wise to agree that all is one. Listening not to me but to the Word it is wise to agree that all things are one. He who hears not me but the logos will say: All is one. It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one.
 * The word translated in these quotes and many others as "The Word" or "Reason", is the greek word λόγος (Logos).

 * ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
 * The road up and the road down is one and the same.
 * Fragment 60
 * Variant translations: The road up and the road down are one and the same. The road uphill and the road downhill are one and the same. The way up and the way down are one and the same.

 * ὁ θεὸς ἡμέρη εὐφρόνη, χειμὼν θέρος, πόλεμος εἰρήνη, κόρος λιμός
 * God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.
 * Fragment 67

 * ταὐτό τ' ἔνι ζῶν καὶ τεθνηκὸς καὶ [τὸ] ἐγρηγορὸς καὶ καθεῦδον καὶ νέον καὶ γηραιόν
 * And it is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old.
 * Fragment 88

 * τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι, τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι
 * The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.
 * Fragment 89
 * Plutarch, Of Superstition

 * ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ
 * You cannot step twice into the same river.
 * Fragment 91
 * Plutarch, On the EI at Delphi

 * Although the Law of Reason is common, the majority of people live as though they had an understanding of their own.
 * Fragment 92, as translated by G.W.T. Patrick, trans.

 * Men are at variance with the one thing with which they are in the most unbroken communion, the reason that administers the whole universe.
 * Fragment 93
 * Friedrich Nietzsche's translation: The law under which most of them ceaselessly have commerce they reject for themselves. (The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Chapter 10)]

 * νέκυες γὰρ κοπρίων ἐκβλητότεροι
 * Corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung.
 * Fragment 96

 * κύνες γὰρ καὶ βαΰζουσινὃν, ἂν μὴ γινώσκωσι.
 * Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.
 * Fragment 97

 * ἀμαθίην κρύπτειν ἄμεινον
 * It is better to conceal ignorance than to expose it.
 * Fragment 109
 * Variant translation: Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

 * ἀνθρώποις γίνεσθαι ὁκόσα θέλουσιν οὐκ ἄμεινον
 * It would not be better if things happened to people just as they wish.
 * Fragment 110
 * Variant translation: It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.

 * Τίς γὰρ αὐτῶν νόος ἢ φρήν; δήμων ἀοιδοῖσι ἕπονται καὶ διδασκάλῳ χρέωνται ὁμίλῳ, οὐκ εἰδότες ὅτι πολλοὶ κακοὶ ὀλίγοι δὲ ἀγαθοί. αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἓν ἀντία πάντων οἱ ἄριστοι, κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκόρηνται ὅκωσπερ κτήνεα.
 * For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all—immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.
 * Fragment 111, as translated by G.W.T. Patrick

 * Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.
 * Fragment 114, as Translated by Daniel W. Graham

 * All human laws are nourished by one divine law.
 * Fragment 114

 * ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων
 * Character is destiny.
 * Fragment 119
 * Variant translations: Character is fate. Man's character is his fate. A man's character is his fate. A man's character is his guardian divinity. One's bearing shapes one's fate.

 * φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ
 * Nature is wont to hide herself.
 * Fragment 123

Disputed

 * Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.
 * As translated by Philip Wheelwright in Heraclitus (1959)

 * Many statements paraphrase or extend upon his famous assertions that "everything changes" in ways which arguably diverge from valid translation, and yet have become widely attributed to Heraclitus:
 * Change is the only constant.
 * There is nothing permanent except change.

Misattributed

 * Of Every One-Hundred Men, Ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are nothing but targets, Nine are real fighters... We are lucky to have them... They make the battle. Ah but the One, One of them is a Warrior... and He will bring the others back.
 * Attributed to "Hericletus c. 500 B.C." [sic] in The Tactical Rifle (1999) by Gabriel Suarez; no earlier source has been found.

Quotes about Heraclitus

 * It was not Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, alone, who taught that the Universe evolves, and its primary substance is transformed from the state of fire into that of air, then into that of water, etc. Heraclitus of Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in Nature is fire. The intelligence that moves the Universe is fire, and fire is intelligence. And while Anaximenes said the same of air, and Thales of Miletus (600 years b.c.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine reconciles all these philosophers, by showing that though each was right, the system of none was complete.
 * H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4  (1888)

 * [With Heraclitus] we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.
 * Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1892), trans. E. S. Haldane, p. 279

 * I walked on to the next corner, sat on a bench at a bus stop, and read in my new book about Heraclitus. All things flow like a river, he said; nothing abides. Parmenides, on the other hand, believed that nothing ever changed, it only seemed so. Both views appealed to me.
 * Ross Macdonald, The Chill (1963), Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition, pp. 209-210.

 * In other countries, too, the idea of a creation was sternly rejected, as, for instance, by Heraclitus, who declares that no god and no man made this world, but that it was always and is and will be, an eternal fire, assuming forms and destroying them. And this protest, it should be remembered, came from a man who was able to say with equal honesty that 'God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger—and that he is called according to the pleasure of every one.'
 * Max Müller, Natural Religion (1892) p. 253.

 * Herakleitos, about 460 B.C., one of the boldest thinkers of ancient Greece, declared that Homer deserved to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged...
 * Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) p. 343.

We have here two aspects of a steady flow, one of unchanging persistence, the other of incessant change. ...Heraclitus was called the "Dark Philosopher"; his views of human affairs were sombre and his sayings obscure. ... "You cannot look twice at the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in." "We look and do not look at the same rivers; we are, and we are not." What is the intended meaning of these sentences? I do not venture to find out. Yet I think that the originator of these senteces came pretty close to formulating the concept "steady flow of a fluid."
 * If the flow is steady, the field velocity vectors and the system of streamlines remain unaffected by the progress of time. Looking at the vector field and its streamlines we do not notice any change. Yet if we could distinguish the different particles of fluid from each other, we could observe incessant change...
 * George Pólya, Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)

 * When... Heraclitus names the world an ever-living fire that... extinguishes itself and again kindles itself, when... all is exchanged for fire and fire for all... he can only understand by this that fire, this restless, all-consuming, all-transmuting, and equally (in heat) all-vivifying element, represents the constant force of this eternal alteration and transformation, the notion of life, in the most vivid and energetic manner. ...the means of which the power of motion that is precedent to all matter avails itself for the production of the living process of things. Heraclitus... explains the multiplicity of things... [fire] condenses itself into material elements, first air, then water, then earth. ...These two processes of extinction and ignition... alternate... in perpetual rotation with each other and... in stated periods the world resolves itself into the primal fire, in order to re-create itself out of it again. ...[F]ire is to him... the principle of movement, of physical as of spiritual vitality; the soul itself is a fiery vapour; its power and perfection depend on its being pure from all grosser and duller elements.
 * , Handbook of the History of Philosophy (1868) pp. 21-22.

 * The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.
 * Socrates, when asked his opinion of Heraclitus's treatise, as quoted in Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers (ed. R. D. Hicks), Book II, Ch. 5, sec. 22.

 * I cannot approve of Heraclitus, who, being self-taught and arrogant, said, "I have explored myself." Nor can I praise him for hiding his poem in the temple of Artemis, in order that it might be published afterwards as a mystery; and those who take an interest in such things say that Euripides the tragic poet came there and read it, and, gradually learning it by heart, carefully handed down to posterity this darkness of Heraclitus.
 * Tatian, Address to the Greek P. 7 Pratten translation

 * If neither sub-atomic particles nor organic species exemplify the 'permanent entities' of Greek metaphysics, what else in the real world does so? ...Two hundred years of historical research have had their effect. Whether we turn to social or intellectual history, evolutionary zoology, historical geology or astronomy—whether we consider explanatory theories or star-clusters, societies or cultures, languages or disciplines, organic species or the Earth itself—the verdict is not Parmenidean but Heraclitean. As we now understand it, nothing in the empirical world possesses the permanent unchanging identity which all Greek natural philosophers (the Epicureans apart) presupposed in the ultimate elements of Nature. So, if we... are to entertain metaphysical thoughts about the nature of things-in-general consistent with the rest of our late-twentieth-century ideas, we must explore the consequences of the modern, post-Darwinian or 'populational' approach, as applied not just to species, but to historical entities of all kinds. Confronted with the question, 'How do permanent entities preserve their identity through all their apparent changes?', we must simply deny the validity of the question itself. In its place, we must substitute the question, 'How do historical entities maintain their coherence and continuity, despite all the real changes they undergo?'
 * , Human Understanding (1972) Vol. 1 The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts.

title: Heraclitus