J. D. Salinger Quotes
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You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac — with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.
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I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
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Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
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It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.
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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.
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All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
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Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. - Mr. Spencer
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Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.
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An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
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There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.
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It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.
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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.
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He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes - fools, no.
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Mothers are all slightly insane.
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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.
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Everybody's a nun.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People never notice anything.
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It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person - the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist - who can write a poem that is a poem.
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I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
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She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.