I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?' Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.

Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

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

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.

Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.