J. D. Salinger: Zooey

After all those years I can't be certain, but I suspect that the scene in which Salinger describes the board on the door of Buddy's and Seymour's room with its welter of unrelated quotations was what made me, aged about 20, start putting down in an A5 book quotations from books that I was reading. A habit I keep to this day, although after starting a fourth book I transferred them to the text-file format, and put them in some order, so that the authors are arranged alphabetically, and quotes from the same book are kept together, even if they were added years apart.

Anyway, reading it again after years I added to those quotations I'd already written down from this book the following:

Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher - or, for that matter, college professor - and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason.

(Zooey)

This speaks to me because despite my degree in civil engineering the jobs I think I was best at were of the 'manual' sort, whether it was mixing mortar on a building site, stacking shelves in  a supermarket, or cutting and printing paper in a printing house.

"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said. - Kafka

From the above-mentioned board; strictly speaking this is a quote from Kafka's diaries, but I haven't read those, so I prefer to keep it under my source.