J.D. Salinger

Quotes

• “I'm not trying to tell you," he said "that only educated men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It'...”
• “When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cl...”
• “I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're...”
• “She was around ten minutes late, as a matter of fact. I didn't give a damn, though. All that crap they have in cartoons ...”
• “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 ...”
• “God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Franc...”
• “I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . The whole arrangement’s designed for...”
• “This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but ...”
• “The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the poo...”
• “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 ...”
• “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 ...”
• “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...”
• “God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and d...”
• “As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invade...”
• “When I really worry about something, I don´t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about some...”
• “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 cauliflowe...”
• “She threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss—spontaneous enough to begin with, but rathe...”
• “I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his ow...”
• “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...”
• “That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a ner...”
• “We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry i...”
• “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 th...”
• “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 th...”
• “Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perce...”
• “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 probab...”
• “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt s...”
• “Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don...”
• “This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don’t mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell bei...”
• “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 want...”
• “Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases an...”
• “But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that does...”
• “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 sa...”
• “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 li...”
• “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...”
• “He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be redu...”
• “... I was feeling so depressed I didn't even think. That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you ca...”
• “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 i...”
• “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 ...”
• “I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m aro...”
• “A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about ...”
• “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 impossibl...”
• “If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego war...”
• “These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing.”
• “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.”
• “It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
• “Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.”
• “I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school.”
• “The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.”
• “You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there.”
• “But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.”