J. D. Salinger Quotes

I could happily lie down and die sometimes.

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.

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.

I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.

I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. Sometimes, I act a lot older than I am--I really do. But people never notice it. People never notice anything.

I live alone (but catless, I'd like everybody to know).

In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw.

Where do the ducks go in the winter?

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.

Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!

But doctors talk about cells as if they had such unlimited importance all by themselves. As if they didn't really belong to the person that has them." Teddy brushed back his hair from his forehead with one hand. "I grew my own body," he said. "Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously, at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because—obviously—I've used it.

I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces — a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast — could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second.

Take most people, they are crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, they are always talking about have many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that is even newer. I do not even like old cars. . . . I'd rather have a horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.

People always clap for the wrong reasons.

I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though.

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.

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.

Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.

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.

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

There are still a few men who love desperately.

God, I wish you could have been there.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

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.

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.

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.

Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. 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.

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 supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.

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

The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it - the same night, as a matter of fact.

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?

There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.

It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.

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.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

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.

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)

But if we come back, if German men come back, if British men come back, and Japs, and French, and all the other men, all of us talking, writing, painting, making movies of heroes, and cockroaches and foxholes and blood, then future generations will always be doomed to future Hitlers. It's never occurred to boys to have contempt for wars, to point to soldiers' pictures in history books, laughing at them. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.

It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.