Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by J.d. Salinger, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring J.d. Salinger quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 549 J.d. Salinger quotes for you to read and share.
The funny part is, I felt like marrying her the minute I saw her. I'm crazy. I didn't even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to God I'm crazy. I admit it. -- J.d. Salinger
Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away. -- J.d. Salinger
Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die. -- J.d. Salinger
There were half circles under her eyes and other, subtler signs that mark an acutely troubled young girl, but nonetheless no one could have missed seeing that she was first-class beauty. -- J.d. Salinger
People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything. -- J.d. Salinger
That's something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time. -- J.d. Salinger
God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be. -- J.d. Salinger
I also say "Boy" a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and some times I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. -- J.d. Salinger
What're you majoring in?" I asked him. "Perverts?" I was only horsing around. "What're you trying to be
funny? -- J.d. Salinger
I don't want to scare you," he said, "but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause. -- J.d. Salinger
(I lied, in 1939, with far greater conviction that I told the truth- so I was positive that M. Yoshoto looked at me with suspicion when I said I wasn't feeling well. -- J.d. Salinger
They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors. It's hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I mean they were good, but they were too good. -- J.d. Salinger
One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of. -- J.d. Salinger
Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls. -- J.d. Salinger
It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window. -- J.d. Salinger
Just get sick sometime and go visit yourself, and you'll find out how tactless you are! -- J.d. Salinger
In my opinion, if you really want to know, half of the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos. -- J.d. Salinger
In a cruel manner of speaking, this young woman may well have lost her head before she was born; it is certainly not on her shoulders at this stage of the game. -- J.d. Salinger
Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence. -- J.d. Salinger
They make everything they touch turn absolutely academic and useless. To my mind, They're mostly to blame for the mob of ignorant oafs with diplomas that are turned loose on the country every June. -- J.d. Salinger
I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to. -- J.d. Salinger
She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth. -- J.d. Salinger
People never believe you. -- J.d. Salinger
Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. -- J.d. Salinger
His voice was oddly and beautifully rough-cut, as some small boys' voices are. Each of his phrasings was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey. -- J.d. Salinger
His date kept saying to him, "How horrible ... Don't, darling. Please, don't. Not here." Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me. -- J.d. Salinger
It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question. -- J.d. Salinger
Lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. -- J.d. Salinger
What do they do with those ducks, in the winter? -- J.d. Salinger
Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage. -- J.d. Salinger
The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. -- J.d. Salinger
When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. -- J.d. Salinger
I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway. -- J.d. Salinger
He took two steps at a time, but slowly, holding onto the banister, putting his whole body into it, as if the act of climbing a flight of stairs was for him, as it is for many children, a moderately pleasurable end in itself. -- J.d. Salinger
Jesus, life has its share of honorable thrills if one but keeps one's eyes open! -- J.d. Salinger
The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. -- J.d. Salinger
You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they're crazy about themself, they think you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favor. It's sort of funny, in a way. -- J.d. Salinger
While the consequences are often quite hellish, I am absolutely and perhaps permanently against ignoring books recommended from the heart by very nice people and strangers; it is too risky and inhuman; also the consequences are often painful in a fairly charming way. -- J.d. Salinger
Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation. -- J.d. Salinger
My life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. -- J.d. Salinger
It's funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they're asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don't. Kids look alright. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look alright. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. -- J.d. Salinger
That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh how nice!" the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice & all. "I must tell Ernest we met," she said. "May I ask your name, dear?"
"Rudolf Schmidt," I told her. I didn't feel like giving her my whole life history. Rudolf Schmidt was the name of the janitor of our dorm. -- J.d. Salinger
Every time you mention some guy that's strictly a bastard - very mean, or very conceited and all - and when you mention it to the girl, she'll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn't keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion. -- J.d. Salinger
The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they'll say he's conceited. Even smart girls do it. -- J.d. Salinger
And I like his conceit. He's so conceited he's actually humble, the crazy bastard. -- J.d. Salinger
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'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. -- J.d. Salinger
Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody. -- J.d. Salinger
If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. -- J.d. Salinger
God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been. -- J.d. Salinger
Something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing ... -- J.d. Salinger
Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard. -- J.d. Salinger
Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid. -- J.d. Salinger
He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor. -- J.d. Salinger
Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor. -- J.d. Salinger
She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible. -- J.d. Salinger
This is a people shooting hat," I said. "I shoot people in this hat. -- J.d. Salinger
It's boring to do that every two minutes. -- J.d. Salinger
He was reading with his mouth open, and he didn't hear me walk across the porch and sit down on the railing opposite his chair.
I kicked his chair with the toe of my shoe. "Stop reading, Mac," I said. "Put down that book. Entertain me." He was reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. -- J.d. Salinger
She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. -- J.d. Salinger
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. -- J.d. Salinger
One cannot even light a casual cigarette unless the artistic permission of the universe is freely given! -- J.d. Salinger
He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world. -- J.d. Salinger
Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that - although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle. -- J.d. Salinger
I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. -- J.d. Salinger
Seymour once said to me - in a crosstown bus, of all places - that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold. -- J.d. Salinger
That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace. -- J.d. Salinger
I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. -- J.d. Salinger
I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I'm not sophisticated. I'm not anything. I'm just me. -- J.d. Salinger
Imagine the story you would most want to read, and then shamelessly write it. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake. -- J.d. Salinger
Exactly what don't I think is beautiful? Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God. Anything. -- J.d. Salinger
There is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful. -- J.d. Salinger
There isn't a nightclub in the world that you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you're with some girl that really knocks you out. -- J.d. Salinger
Lane watched her for a moment with mounting irritation. Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating. In any case, he surely was concerned over the possibility that this bug Franny had might bitch up the whole weekend. -- J.d. Salinger
It ends up with everybody at this long dinner table laughing their asses off because the great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies. Everybody thought it was a male , I suppose, or some goddam thing. All I can say is, don't see it if you don't want to puke all over yourself. -- J.d. Salinger
The thing is, it drives me crazy if somebody else gets killed - especially somebody very smart and entertaining and all - and it's somebody else's fault. -- J.d. Salinger
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. -- J.d. Salinger
I knew a lot of guys at Pencey I thought were a lot handsomer than Stradlater, but they wouldn't look handsome if you saw their pictures in the Year Book. They'd look like they had big noses or their ears stuck out. -- J.d. Salinger
That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can. -- J.d. Salinger
This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me. -- J.d. Salinger
We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound. -- J.d. Salinger
You're a real prince. You're a gentleman and a scholar, kid. -- J.d. Salinger
A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride. -- J.d. Salinger
In a matter of only a few seconds, in fact, her eyes appeared to jettison everything that was dark and heavy and to glow with fan-club appreciation. -- J.d. Salinger
Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer - that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it - to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. -- J.d. Salinger
You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers. -- J.d. Salinger
Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. -- J.d. Salinger
Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day. -- J.d. Salinger
I said old Jesus probably would've puked if He could see it - all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one. -- J.d. Salinger
That's one nice thing about carrousels, they always play the same songs. -- J.d. Salinger
I say that the true artist seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own human conscience. -- J.d. Salinger
I kept picturing all these little kids in this big field of rye ... If they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. -- J.d. Salinger
Everybody just thinks things keep stopping off somewhere. They don't ... The reason things seem to stop off somewhere is because that's the only way most people know how to look at things. But that doesn't mean they do. -- J.d. Salinger
His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like 'the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo. -- J.d. Salinger
Postponed pain is among the most abominable kind to experience. -- J.d. Salinger
I took a look out the window before I left the room, though, to see how all the perverts were doing, but they all had their shades down. They were the heighth of modesty in the morning. -- J.d. Salinger
He was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question -- J.d. Salinger
If you're supposed to sock somebody in the jaw, and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it. I'm just no good at it, though. I'd rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw. -- J.d. Salinger
I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing. -- J.d. Salinger
The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ] -- J.d. Salinger
She doesn't like her own room because it's too little, she says. She says she likes to spread out. That kills me. What's old Phoebe got to spread out? Nothing. -- J.d. Salinger
She really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over - anywhere - her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows, and all, her ears - her whole face except her mouth and all. -- J.d. Salinger
Think how practical, pleasant, and thrilling it would be if one could open one's mouth, from time to time, and something other than sheer, forward, unreliable opinion came out! -- J.d. Salinger
I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired - my God, so tired - of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath. -- J.d. Salinger
If a body catch a body coming through the rye. -- J.d. Salinger
Indeed, all forms of human folly and beastiality touch a very symphathetic chord within our breasts! -- J.d. Salinger
I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything. -- J.d. Salinger
I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I'm crazy. I swear to God I am. -- J.d. Salinger
My God, think of the opportunities and thrusts that lie ahead when one knows without a shred of doubt how commonplace and normal one is at heart! -- J.d. Salinger
That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman. -- J.d. Salinger
She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years. -- J.d. Salinger
You hate to tell new stuff to somebody around a hundred years old. They don't like to hear it. -- J.d. Salinger
Undoubtedly, though, what I'm really getting at is this: Since the bridegroom's permanent retirement from the scene, I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead. -- J.d. Salinger
She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty. -- J.d. Salinger
It makes me so depressed I go crazy. -- J.d. Salinger
Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they'll still be floating will be inside my mind. That's quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that's where they started floating in the first place. -- J.d. Salinger
After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances ... I may be an orange peel. -- J.d. Salinger
It was just terrible! And the worst part was, I knew what a bore I was being, I knew how I was depressing people, or even hurting their feelings- but I just couldn't stop! I just could not stop picking! -- J.d. Salinger
Happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid. -- J.d. Salinger
It means that every man, woman, and child over the age, let us say, of twentyone or thirty, at the very outside, should never do anything extremely important or crucial in their life without first consulting a list of persons in the world, living or dead, whom he loves. -- J.d. Salinger
He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs. -- J.d. Salinger
Don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else. -- J.d. Salinger
I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts. -- J.d. Salinger
I love to write and I assure you I write regularly ... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it. -- J.d. Salinger
Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy. -- J.d. Salinger
Yeah?" Stradlater said. That really interested him. About the booze hound running around the house naked, with Jane around. Stradlater was a very sexy bastard.
"She had a lousy childhood. I'm not kidding."
That didn't interest Stradlater, though. Only very sexy stuff interested him. -- J.d. Salinger
How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of concentrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose? -- J.d. Salinger
He gave out a big yawn while he said that. Which is something that gives me a royal pain in the ass. I mean if somebody yawns right while they're asking you to do them a goddamn favor. -- J.d. Salinger
I've met the girl. She's a zero in my opinion but terrific-looking. I don't actually know that she's a zero. I mean she hardly said two words the night I met her. Just sat and smiled and smoked, so it isn't fair to say. -- J.d. Salinger
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 ... -- J.d. Salinger
Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. -- J.d. Salinger
[ ... ] don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy. -- J.d. Salinger
If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable. -- J.d. Salinger
Every tune I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again. -- J.d. Salinger
You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live. -- J.d. Salinger
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people ... Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. -- J.d. Salinger
Let's just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you. -- J.d. Salinger
They gave Sally this little blue butt-twitcher of a dress to wear. She really did look damn good in it, though. I have to admit it. And don't think she didn't know it. She kept walking ahead of me, so that I'd see how cute her little ass looked. It did look pretty cute, too. I hate to admit it. -- J.d. Salinger
He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in. -- J.d. Salinger
That's something that annoys the hell out of me- I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't -- J.d. Salinger
-Hey, listen," I said. "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?" I realized it was only one chance in a million. -- J.d. Salinger
the sentence im reading is terrific ... -- J.d. Salinger
She looked nice, smoking. She inhaled and all,m but she didn't wolf the smoke down, the way most women around her age do. She had a lot of charm. She had quite a lot of sex appeal, too, if you really want to know. -- J.d. Salinger
Zui-Gan called out to himself every way, "Master."
Then he answered himself, "Yes, sir."
And then he added, "Become sober."
Again he answered, "Yes, sir."
"And after that," he continued, "do not be deceived by others."
"Yes, sir; yes, sir," he replied. -Mu-Mon-Kwan. -- J.d. Salinger
If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly. -- J.d. Salinger
If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me. -- J.d. Salinger
An instant later, a silk hat materialised in the air beside me, considerably down and to the left, and my special, only technically unassigned cohort grinned up at me - for a moment, I rather thought he was going to slip his hand into mine. -- J.d. Salinger
After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. -- J.d. Salinger
Are all your stars shining? -- J.d. Salinger
The little girl on the plane Who turned her doll's head around To look at me. -- J.d. Salinger
He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective. -- J.d. Salinger
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. -- J.d. Salinger
Did anybody say anything about being flawless? Perfection is
an absolutely different word, magnificently left hanging for the human being's kind benefit throughout the ages! -- J.d. Salinger
He looked at me with his eyes shining - yes, shining. The boy's eyes could shine. -- J.d. Salinger
The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding. -- J.d. Salinger
But you can't always tell - with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane. -- J.d. Salinger
I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck. -- J.d. Salinger
You should've seen the way they said hello. You'd have thought they hadn't seen each other in twenty years. You'd have thought they'd taken baths in the same bathtub or something when they were little kids. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting. -- J.d. Salinger
He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948. -- J.d. Salinger
She had a nice voice. A nice telephone voice, mostly. She should've carried a goddamn telephone around with her. -- J.d. Salinger
When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. -- J.d. Salinger
I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't you feel even worse. -- J.d. Salinger
How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground. -- J.d. Salinger
Some stories, my property, have been stolen. Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked, and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel. -- J.d. Salinger
If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet. -- J.d. Salinger
The hole in the shoulder of his T shirt was not a cute hole. The excess material in the seat of his seersucker shorts, the excess length of the shorts themselves, were not cute excesses. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't even like old cars. I mean, they don't even interest me at all. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human -- J.d. Salinger
I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. -- J.d. Salinger
I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone - a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness. -- J.d. Salinger
The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. -- J.d. Salinger
It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it. -- J.d. Salinger
In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together. -- J.d. Salinger
Do it for the fat lady! -- J.d. Salinger
We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle. -- J.d. Salinger
It is too ironical to bear, but I give you my word that valorous people require far more protec-tion than meets the eye. -- J.d. Salinger
When I'd originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I'd had a passing impulse to pick him up bodily and insert him gently through the open window. -- J.d. Salinger
That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think. -- J.d. Salinger
They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all-I'm not saying that-but they're also touchy as hell. -- J.d. Salinger
You keep records of their troubles. You'll learn from them. If you want to Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education, it's history. -- J.d. Salinger
And for some reason he had an unfolded white handkerchief draped over his head, possibly to ward off rain, or hail, or brimstone. -- J.d. Salinger
I hate saying corny things like "traveling incognito." But when I'm with somebody that's corny, I always act corny too. -- J.d. Salinger
Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect. -- J.d. Salinger
People always clap for the wrong reasons. -- J.d. Salinger
She gave me the big freeze when I said hello that day, though. I had a helluva time convincing her that I didn't give a good goddam where her dog relieved himself. He could do it in the living room, for all I cared. -- J.d. Salinger
I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm sick to death of being the heavy in everybody's life. -- J.d. Salinger
I've never seen such a bunch of apple-eaters. -- J.d. Salinger
John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on. -- J.d. Salinger
Zooey said ... It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy. -- J.d. Salinger
I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door.
( A Boy in France : Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945) -- J.d. Salinger
I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. -- J.d. Salinger
We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that's all. We're the tattooed lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too. -- J.d. Salinger
My atoms, moreover, are arranged to make me constitutionally inclined to believe that where there's smoke there's usually strawberry Jello, seldom fire ... -- J.d. Salinger
I privately say to you, old friend ... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))). -- J.d. Salinger
Unfortunately, here as elsewhere on this touching planet, imitation is the watchword and prestige the highest ambition. -- J.d. Salinger
A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about all. -- J.d. Salinger
There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time. -- J.d. Salinger
God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at! -- J.d. Salinger
Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said. -- J.d. Salinger
In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw. -- J.d. Salinger
Life is a gift horse in my opinion. -- J.d. Salinger
Then I started reading this timetable I had in my pocket. Just stop lying. Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours. -- J.d. Salinger
If he didn't have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see out Zooey again. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me. -- J.d. Salinger
You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It's marvelously liberating. -- J.d. Salinger
I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about. -- J.d. Salinger
I like to chew candles. -- J.d. Salinger
He could hear me alright ... but he didn't answer me right away. He was the kind of guy that hates to answer you right away. -- J.d. Salinger
I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. -- J.d. Salinger
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. -- J.d. Salinger
I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life. -- J.d. Salinger
If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more. -- J.d. Salinger
I watched Kenneth's face like a writer. -- J.d. Salinger
The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die. -- J.d. Salinger
God, I wish you could have been there. -- J.d. Salinger
I said no, there would't be marvelous places to go to after I went to college and all. Open your ears. It'd be entirely different. -- J.d. Salinger
I'd be the catcher in the rye and all. -- J.d. Salinger
This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one. -- J.d. Salinger
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. -- J.d. Salinger
I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you Vince?"
"Not a thing. It's the best thing there is. Just About. -- J.d. Salinger
Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something? -- J.d. Salinger
If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm. -- J.d. Salinger
Old Luce. He was strictly a pain in the ass, but he certainly had a good vocabulary. He had the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton when I was there. They gave us a test. -- J.d. Salinger
Listen," he said. "If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?"
No, but
"
You're goddam right they don't -- J.d. Salinger
The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. -- J.d. Salinger
I find it magnificent how beau-tiful, loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with de-cent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength. -- J.d. Salinger
Sentimentality is loving something more than God does. -- J.d. Salinger
He stuck around till around dinnertime, talking about all the guys at Pencey that he hated their guts, and squeezing this big pimple on his chin. He didn't even use a handkerchief. I don't even think the bastard had a handkerchief, if you want to know the truth. I never saw him use one, anyway. -- J.d. Salinger
Give me an honest con man any day. -- J.d. Salinger
This is nobody's fault, swiftly be assured; being human beings with personal opinions and brains, we are respondent to any shreds of beauty we can get; I myself am hopelessly respondent to it! -- J.d. Salinger
He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement. -- J.d. Salinger
Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong. -- J.d. Salinger
This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't. -- J.d. Salinger
It didn't exactly depress me to think about it, but it didn't make me feel gay as hell either. Certain things should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but its too bad anyways. -- J.d. Salinger
There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself. -- J.d. Salinger
It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win. -- J.d. Salinger
Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it. -- J.d. Salinger
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh, it's lovely to see you!' Franny said as the cab moved off. 'I've missed you.' The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm the one flunking out of this goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition. -- J.d. Salinger
And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight. -- J.d. Salinger
I was surrounded by jerks. I'm not kidding. -- J.d. Salinger
I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake
especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all. -- J.d. Salinger
I mean he was mostly a Year Book kind of handsome guy. -- J.d. Salinger
She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs. -- J.d. Salinger
I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -Holden Caulfield -- J.d. Salinger
My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking. -- J.d. Salinger
Then, with instantly one-pointed concentration, as if only he and the notebook existed- no sunshine, no fellow passengers, no ship- he began to turn the pages. -- J.d. Salinger
While I was walking I passed these two guys that were unloading this big Christmas tree off a truck. One guy, kept saying to the other guy, 'Hold the sonunvabitch up! Hold it up, for Chrissake!' It certainly was a gorgeous way to talk about a Christmas tree. -- J.d. Salinger
Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos. -- J.d. Salinger
Well. He's a very sensitive boy. He's really never been a terribly good mixer with other boys ... '
Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddamn toilet seat. -- J.d. Salinger
Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn't smell like anyplace else. I don't know what the hell it is. It isn't cauliflower and it isn't perfume - I don't know what the hell it is - but you always know you're home. -- J.d. Salinger
He's like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism and that everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn't even- -- J.d. Salinger
Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do. -- J.d. Salinger
I said I thought she had a very fine voice.
She nodded. 'I know. I'm going to be a professional singer.'
'Really? Opera?'
'Heavens, no. I'm going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I'm thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio. -- J.d. Salinger
You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, ... And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled, what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and - well, we iron things out together, that's all. -- J.d. Salinger
He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were. -- J.d. Salinger
I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face. -- J.d. Salinger
Call up and say you were killed. Let go of that damn glass. -- J.d. Salinger
Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row. -- J.d. Salinger
I felt like giving old Jane a buzz -- J.d. Salinger
I'm not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him. -- J.d. Salinger
You never knew if he was nodding a lot because he was thinking and all, or just because he was a nice old guy that didn't know his ass from his elbow. -- J.d. Salinger
Who the Hell is Lane? he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admiti that he know the first names of certain people. -- J.d. Salinger
I never bore people I haven't known for at least a thousand years. -- J.d. Salinger
People are always ruining things for you. -- J.d. Salinger
It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. -- J.d. Salinger
I mean if thousands of little kids are running and they do not look where they are going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day, I just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but this is the only thing that I really like to do! -- J.d. Salinger
If you weren't around, I'd probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddamn place. You're the only reason I'm around, practically. -- J.d. Salinger
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. -- J.d. Salinger
Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don't just go up to somebody and say, 'You're a terrific whistler. -- J.d. Salinger
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? -- J.d. Salinger
I love you to pieces, distraction, etc. -- J.d. Salinger
I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway. -- J.d. Salinger
I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wish I was dead. -- J.d. Salinger
Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl. -- J.d. Salinger
For a psychoanalyst to be any good ... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. -- J.d. Salinger
It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out. -- J.d. Salinger
Sometimes I see me dead in the rain. -- J.d. Salinger
But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. -- J.d. Salinger
If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children. -- J.d. Salinger
She's quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that's what she is, roller-skate skinny. You'd like her. -- J.d. Salinger
What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in awhile. -- J.d. Salinger
He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving. -- J.d. Salinger
She was not one for emptying her face of expression. -- J.d. Salinger
I am not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt.It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. -- J.d. Salinger
Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies -- J.d. Salinger
All mothers are slightly insane. -- J.d. Salinger
You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all. -- J.d. Salinger
It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world. -- J.d. Salinger
Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much. -- J.d. Salinger
His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them -- J.d. Salinger
I spent a little more than five months in Vienna. I danced. I went ice skating and skiing. For strenuous exercise, I argued with an Englishman. -- J.d. Salinger
I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty ... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it. -- J.d. Salinger
For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree. -- J.d. Salinger
Boys have always had to go to war -- J.d. Salinger
It would be quite a relief to rid my system of fustian this year. -- J.d. Salinger
He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor. -- J.d. Salinger
They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets. -- J.d. Salinger
I sort of miss everybody I told about. -- J.d. Salinger
People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, ... ,and he had very red hair. -- J.d. Salinger
People never notice anything. -- J.d. Salinger
He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff. -- J.d. Salinger
Mrs. Glass watched him pull it on. She didn't stay for the tying of the lace, however.
Instead, she left the room. -- J.d. Salinger
You beautiful little moron. -- J.d. Salinger
I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. -- J.d. Salinger
I make everybody feel that he doesn't really want to do any good work but that he just wants to get work done that will be thought good by everyone he knows ... -- J.d. Salinger
And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up. -- J.d. Salinger
I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you. -- J.d. Salinger
I think he was pretty surprised to hear from me. I once called him a fat-assed phony. -- J.d. Salinger
These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing. -- J.d. Salinger
I go because I sit in judgment on every poor, ulcerous bastard I know. Which in itself doesn't bother me too much. At least, I judge straight from the colon when I judge, and I know that I'll pay like hell for any judgment I mete out, sooner or later, one way or another. -- J.d. Salinger
Nobody knows how to do it except the Egyptians. Even modern science. -- J.d. Salinger
As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts. -- J.d. Salinger
But her arms were probably the best of her. They were brown and round and good. -- J.d. Salinger
I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't. -- J.d. Salinger
You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world. -- J.d. Salinger
Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly. -- J.d. Salinger
This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts. -- J.d. Salinger
It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. -- J.d. Salinger
But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have
on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. -- J.d. Salinger
Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad. -- J.d. Salinger
Aunt
Uh
There's a war on. Uh
I mean you've seen it on the newsreels. I mean you've heard it on the radio and all, haven't you? -- J.d. Salinger
It's full of phonies and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a golden Cadillac ... -- J.d. Salinger
Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are ... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God. -- J.d. Salinger
Sleep tight, ya morons! -- J.d. Salinger
There are still a few men who love desperately. -- J.d. Salinger
I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do -- J.d. Salinger
I don't like it when it stings,' he said. 'Nobody does. -- J.d. Salinger
The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody'd say something smarter than he had. -- J.d. Salinger
If I'd wanted this place to fill up with every fat Irish rose that passes by, I'd've said so. -- J.d. Salinger
Without the mind, sensuality quite has no organs to call her own! -- J.d. Salinger
My mother's dead, and I have to live with her charming husband, and nobody in New York speaks French, and there aren't any chairs in your son's room. -- J.d. Salinger
The connection was so bad, and I couldn't talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back 'What? -- J.d. Salinger
You used to be such a swell kid," Bobby stated briefly.
"Oh! And I ain't no more?" Helen little-girl'd. -- J.d. Salinger
Almost every damn school in the world gets out earlier for Christmas break than the school I go to. -- J.d. Salinger
If you've had a freakish education, at least use it, use it. -- J.d. Salinger
That's depressing, when somebody says "please" to you. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal. -- J.d. Salinger
The mark of a mature man is not willing to die for a worthy cause, rather it's willing to live for one -- J.d. Salinger
A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing. -- J.d. Salinger
Me, myself and I. -- J.d. Salinger
But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter. -- J.d. Salinger
Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat. -- J.d. Salinger
You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -- J.d. Salinger
Even the most sublimely accomplished non-stop talker can't consistently please. -- J.d. Salinger
Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire. -- J.d. Salinger
But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect. -- J.d. Salinger
I know. I'm very hard to talk to. I realize that. -- J.d. Salinger
He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once. -- J.d. Salinger
There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. -- J.d. Salinger
On top of everything else," he said immediately, "we've got 'Wise Child' complexes. We've never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound. At least I do ... it's impossible for me to keep my mouth shut. -- J.d. Salinger
Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy. -- J.d. Salinger
I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around. -- J.d. Salinger
Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- Holden Caulfield
The Catcher in the Rye -- J.d. Salinger
Dont's ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everyone- Holden Caulfield -- J.d. Salinger
Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely. -- J.d. Salinger
Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things - doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. -- J.d. Salinger
I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say 'Holden Caulfield' on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'Fuck you.' I'm positive, in fact. -- J.d. Salinger
How old are you? I asked her. "Old enough to know better." she said. -- J.d. Salinger
I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. -- J.d. Salinger
I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something. -- J.d. Salinger
Don't ever tell anybody anything, or you'll start missing everybody. -- J.d. Salinger
Without keeping up a merciless guard, day and night, the variety of forward opinions in this world could easily destroy one's sanity. -- J.d. Salinger
It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself. -- J.d. Salinger
If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will. -- J.d. Salinger
You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. -- J.d. Salinger
He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism ... -- J.d. Salinger
Then I tried to get them in a little intelligent conversation, but it was practically impossible. -- J.d. Salinger
Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. -- J.d. Salinger
People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it. -- J.d. Salinger
It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle. -- J.d. Salinger
I was surrounded by phonies ... They were coming in the goddam window. -- J.d. Salinger
God, how I hate it when somebody yells "Good luck!" at me when I'm leaving somewhere. It's depressing. -- J.d. Salinger
The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding -- J.d. Salinger
You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. -- J.d. Salinger
All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want - some bastard with wavy hair? -- J.d. Salinger
Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell. -- J.d. Salinger
My big trouble is, I always sort of think whoever I'm necking is a pretty intelligent person. It hasn't got a goddam thing to do with it, but I keep thinking it anyway. -- J.d. Salinger
You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life. -- J.d. Salinger
At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick's skull. I want an honorable goddam skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddam skull like Yorick's. -- J.d. Salinger
It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road. -- J.d. Salinger
We're all animals,' he said. 'Basically, we're all animals. -- J.d. Salinger
It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain. -- J.d. Salinger
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of. -- J.d. Salinger
Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up. -- J.d. Salinger
He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why. -- J.d. Salinger
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's. -- J.d. Salinger
Mother, darling, don't yell at me. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl. -- J.d. Salinger
Did you see more glass? -- J.d. Salinger
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions. -- J.d. Salinger
It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen -- J.d. Salinger
She gave me a pain in the ass, but she was very good looking. -- J.d. Salinger
Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted-or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect-he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye. -- J.d. Salinger
I just hope that one day - preferably when we're both blind drunk - we can talk about it. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh ... It's too long a story. I never bore people I haven't know for at least a thousand years. -- J.d. Salinger
Soon the Laughing Man has amassed the largest personal fortune in the world. Most of it he contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery- humble ascetics who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs. -- J.d. Salinger
I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead. -- J.d. Salinger
I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I? -- J.d. Salinger
Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that. -- J.d. Salinger
But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me. -- J.d. Salinger
The one ugly one, Laverne, wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty, was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor. -- J.d. Salinger
They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way. -- J.d. Salinger
< ...=""> However I have thought of you frequently and of the extremely pleasant afternoon we spent in each other's company on April 30, 1944 between 3:45 and 4:15 P. M. in case it slipped your mind. -- J.d. Salinger
Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it. -- J.d. Salinger
I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me. -- J.d. Salinger
You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth. -- J.d. Salinger
She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. -- J.d. Salinger
A woman's body is like a violin and all, and that it takes a terrific musician to play it right -- J.d. Salinger
Watch your language, if you don't mind."
What a lady, boy. A queen, for Chrissake. -- J.d. Salinger
I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin. -- J.d. Salinger
Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.) -- J.d. Salinger
If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? -- J.d. Salinger
(He) looked directly into his own eyes, as though his eyes were neutral territory, a no man's land in a private war against narcissism. -- J.d. Salinger
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. I know it's crazy. -- J.d. Salinger
New York is terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. -- J.d. Salinger
The catcher in the rye ... that's all I really want to be ... -- J.d. Salinger
I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts. -- J.d. Salinger
If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible. -- J.d. Salinger
New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. -- J.d. Salinger
Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. -- J.d. Salinger
Oh, this happiness is strong stuff. -- J.d. Salinger
Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. -- J.d. Salinger
I didn't feel like it. You really have to be in the mood for that stuff. -- J.d. Salinger
I live alone (but catless, I'd like everybody to know) ... -- J.d. Salinger
I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm a condition, not a man. -- J.d. Salinger
Girls. You never know what they're going to think. -- J.d. Salinger
Surely, he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo and our one full poet. -- J.d. Salinger
is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield -- J.d. Salinger
Mothers are all slightly insane. -- J.d. Salinger
Everybody in this family gets his goddamn religion in a different package. -- J.d. Salinger
Hi,' he said. He always said it like he was terrifically bored or terrifically tired. He didn't want you to think he was visiting you or anything. He wanted you to think he'd come in by mistake, for God's sake. -- J.d. Salinger
Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you're able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can't you use the same energy to stay well and busy? -- J.d. Salinger
Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear. -- J.d. Salinger
One thing? One thing I like? Okay. -- J.d. Salinger
An Aesthetic Saint -- J.d. Salinger
In the first place, you're way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. -- J.d. Salinger
Money always ends up making you blue. -- J.d. Salinger
Eight dollars and eighty-five cents. Sixty-five cents. I spent some. -- J.d. Salinger
Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly -- J.d. Salinger
The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them. -- J.d. Salinger
But fishing, as we know, in libraries or anywhere else, is a tricky business, with never a certainty of who's going to catch whom. -- J.d. Salinger
I've survived a lot of things, and I'll probably survive this. -- J.d. Salinger
I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something. -- J.d. Salinger
God, I wish you could've been there. -- J.d. Salinger
This is of unspeakable importance. Please send any books on the structure of the human heart that I have not read -- J.d. Salinger
Wuttaya say."
"Bill's inside," Lucille said. "Get me a drink, willya, Harry?"
"Sure. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they? -- J.d. Salinger
I cut going there entirely, gradually. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it. -- J.d. Salinger
When they argue, there can be no danger of a permanent rift, because they're Mother and Daughter. A terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch. -- J.d. Salinger
I could happily lie down and die sometimes. -- J.d. Salinger
What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory. -- J.d. Salinger
Some of my best friedns are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't get hardly anything out of anything. I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape. -- J.d. Salinger
Her self-imposed sentence of unadulterated good-listenership had been fully served. -- J.d. Salinger
Real ugly girls have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes. -- J.d. Salinger
You're a very, very strange boy."
"I know it", I said. -- J.d. Salinger
As a matter of fact, I'm the only dumb one in the family. -- J.d. Salinger
I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. -- J.d. Salinger
He finished combing his goddamn gorgeous hair. -- J.d. Salinger
Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it. -- J.d. Salinger
She was always reading, and she read very good books. -- J.d. Salinger
Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. -- J.d. Salinger
She's quite intelligent, in my stupidity. -- J.d. Salinger
Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. - Holden Caulfield -- J.d. Salinger
Sometimes I talk a little loud when I get excited. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes. -- J.d. Salinger
In certain Zen monasteries, it's a cardinal rule, if not the only serious enforced discipline, that when one monk calls out 'Hi!' to another monk, the latter must call back 'Hi!' without thinking. -- J.d. Salinger
It's just that if I'd had any guts at all, I wouldn't have gone back to college at all this year. I don't know. I mean it's all the most incredible farce. -- J.d. Salinger
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. -- J.d. Salinger
Am I very late?" she asked the Chief, smiling at him. She might just as well have asked if she was ugly. "No!" the Chief said. -- J.d. Salinger
It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked at it. -- J.d. Salinger
The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn't have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see our Zooey again. -- J.d. Salinger
You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes. -- J.d. Salinger
It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday. -- J.d. Salinger
Where you girls from? Don't answer if you don't feel like it. I don't want you to strain yourself. -- J.d. Salinger
He was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream
clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls. -- J.d. Salinger
Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip! -- J.d. Salinger
if somebody at least listens it not too bad -- J.d. Salinger
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it. -- J.d. Salinger
I get lonesome up there," I told him. "I picked a lousy profession. If I ever write a novel I think I'll join a choir or something and run to meetings between chapters. -- J.d. Salinger
Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic. -- J.d. Salinger
If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm up to my ears in unwritten words. -- J.d. Salinger
The swimming stinks here because there are no waves even little waves. What good is it without any ways and you never get scared or turned all over -- J.d. Salinger
It is possible that I was mistaken and I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am willing to stay in the dark. -- J.d. Salinger
I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in. -- J.d. Salinger
I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work. -- J.d. Salinger
The world is full of actors pretending to be human -- J.d. Salinger
I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood. -- J.d. Salinger
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. -- J.d. Salinger
How do you know you're going to do something, untill you do it? -- J.d. Salinger
Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest. -- J.d. Salinger
It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it. -- J.d. Salinger
It's history. It's poetry. -- J.d. Salinger
It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes. -- J.d. Salinger
You're a student - whether that idea appeals to you or not. You're in love with knowledge. -- J.d. Salinger
I love you I love you I love you. Do you actually know I've only danced with you twice in eleven months? -- J.d. Salinger
And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy) -- J.d. Salinger
I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school. -- J.d. Salinger
Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' -- J.d. Salinger
A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket. -- J.d. Salinger
I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one. -- J.d. Salinger
So long, crumb-bum. -- J.d. Salinger
Men bore me;
Women abhor me;
Children floor me;
Society stinks -- J.d. Salinger
He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. -- J.d. Salinger
Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word. -- J.d. Salinger
I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it. -- J.d. Salinger
I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas. -- J.d. Salinger
My opinions are all too frequently too damn harsh for words. -- J.d. Salinger
Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs. -- J.d. Salinger
The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands? -- J.d. Salinger
Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh. -- J.d. Salinger
But I'm Crazy. I swear to God I am. -- J.d. Salinger
People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not. -- J.d. Salinger
Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might. -- J.d. Salinger
In New York, boy, money really talks - I'm not kidding. -- J.d. Salinger
I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters. -- J.d. Salinger
Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong? -- J.d. Salinger
Where do the ducks go in the winter? -- J.d. Salinger
I'd never yell, "Good luck!" at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it. -- J.d. Salinger
Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? -- J.d. Salinger
I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them. -- J.d. Salinger
You don't always have to get too sexy to get to know a girl. -- J.d. Salinger
All we do our entire lives is go to one piece of holy ground to another -- J.d. Salinger
I think I'd first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate. I'd try to show them how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that...I guess, even before that, I'd get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever told them. -- J.d. Salinger
I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though. -- J.d. Salinger
If you're not in
the mood, you can't do that stuff right. -- J.d. Salinger
He wasn't even listening. He hardly ever listened to you when you said anything. -- J.d. Salinger
- and poetry, surely, is a crisis. -- J.d. Salinger
That'strong>sstrong> strong>sstrong>omething that drivestrong>sstrong> me crazy. When people strong>sstrong>ay strong>sstrong>omething twice that way, after you admit it the firstrong>sstrong>t time. -- J.d. Salinger
