J. D. Salinger Quotes
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The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
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I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.
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Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.
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I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.
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It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.
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I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
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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
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Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
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I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.
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Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).
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If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.
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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
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I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.
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Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.
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Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.
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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.
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I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf, out of their reach.
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Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
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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!
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There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.