J. D. Salinger Quotes
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It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.
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Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.
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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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I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.
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We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.
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I held hands with her all the time...that doesn't sound like much, I realize, but she was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something.
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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.
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The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything.
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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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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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While I was walking I passed these two guys that were unloading this big Christmas tree off a truck. One guy, kept saying to the other guy, 'Hold the sonunvabitch up! Hold it up, for Chrissake!' It certainly was a gorgeous way to talk about a Christmas tree.
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I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.
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Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.
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I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.
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My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.
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I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.
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But don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God.
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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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She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
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That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.
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I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
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It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.
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We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.
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There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.