But don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God.
Interpretation
The speaker acknowledges their deep sensitivity to beauty, highlighting how profound experiences can affect them emotionally.
In this quote, J. D. Salinger expresses a strong emotional connection to beauty, suggesting that it is a significant and vulnerable part of his identity. The phrase 'Achilles' heel' implies that while he may have strengths, his sensitivity to beauty is a particular weakness, making him feel deeply affected by aesthetic experiences, such as the sight of a pink sunset.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of art in our lives.
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.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. 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. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
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 to bat
Who in the Bible besides 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 can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary. The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary. But you wouldn't clap yet, because making something disappear isn't enough. You have to bring it back.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names.
Being called a conscious rapper is quite a compliment. It's a great thing to be. But as an artist, my nature is to not be in a box.
My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.
You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.
Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.
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