J. D. Salinger Quotes
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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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It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
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I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
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People never believe you.
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How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back 'What?'
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I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
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How do you know you're going to do something, untill you do it?
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You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.
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Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.
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If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.
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For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world - not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things - work out rather beautifully.
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I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.
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I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing - perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist.
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When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer - you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission.
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The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
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'You know Adam?' Teddy asked him.'Do I know who?''Adam. In the Bible.'Nicholson smiled. 'Not personally,' he said dryly.
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The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth.
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If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.
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'I never saw so many tigers.'
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I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.
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But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.
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What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
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I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
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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