J. D. Salinger Quotes
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He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.
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probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. how well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. she was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that
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She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
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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.
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Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
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Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.
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Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.
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It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.
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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.
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I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.
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For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
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Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God.
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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.
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His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them
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He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
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That's something that annoys the hell out of me-I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't.
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Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
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It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.
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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.
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I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to.
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But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most. I mean you can’t help it sometimes.
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What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory.
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I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
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A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.