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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.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger -
She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger -
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.
J. D. Salinger -
I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.
J. D. Salinger -
Let's just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.
J. D. Salinger -
Don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.
J. D. Salinger -
It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.
J. D. Salinger
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After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger -
You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.
J. D. Salinger -
If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one.
J. D. Salinger -
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.
J. D. Salinger -
Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger -
He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.
J. D. Salinger -
Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.
J. D. Salinger -
It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.
J. D. Salinger