“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 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.”
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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
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“If I can demonstrate to a madman that his ideas do not lie beyond the sphere of the human mind, he will still feel part of human society, and there is still hope. As long as you can make yourself understood to one single person, you are not yet mad. And even if you find no such person, you should consult some old books, and perhaps there you will find something that seems familiar to you. Only when you can no longer make yourself understood will you be mad and excluded.”
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“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Lady Windermere's Fan
― Lady Windermere's Fan
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