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, becauseโobviouslyโI've used it.
J. D. SalingerI drew laughing, high-breasted girls aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens.
J. D. SalingerI 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. SalingerI 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. SalingerI was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean Iโve left schools and places I didnโt even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I donโt care if itโs a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know Iโm leaving it. If you donโt you feel even worse.
J. D. SalingerHowever contradictory the coroner's report โ whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death โ isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? 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 sacred human conscience.
J. D. Salinger