Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a desire for engaging storytelling that captivates and excites the mind.
In this quote, J. D. Salinger captures the essence of being profoundly engaged in a story to the point where it alters one's perception of time and reality. The speaker desires a narrative powerful enough to keep them awake at night, illustrating the profound impact that storytelling can have on an individual, evoking emotions and a sense of wonder that transcends ordinary experiences.
In practice
In a book club discussion, one might use this quote to highlight the power of literature in keeping readers engaged.
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.
The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.
A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
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