Salinger Quotes

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. ~ J.D. Salinger

I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -Holden Caulfield ~ J.D. Salinger

Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh. ~ J.D. Salinger

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. ~ J.D. Salinger

She's quite intelligent, in my stupidity. ~ J.D. Salinger

God, could that dopey girl dance. Buddy Singer and his stinking band was playing 'Just One of Those Things' and even they couldn't ruin it entirely. It's a swell song. I didn't try any trick stuff while we danced
I hate a guy that does a lot of show-off tricky stuff on the dance floor
but I was moving her around plenty, and she stayed with me. The funny thing is, I thought she was enjoying it, too, till all of a sudden she came out with this very dumb remark. "I and my girl friends saw Peter Lorre last night," she said. "The movie actor. In person. He was buyin' a newspaper. He's cute."
"You're lucky," I told her. "You're really lucky. You know that?" She was really a moron. But what a dancer. ~ J.D. Salinger

Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted-or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect-he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye. ~ J.D. Salinger

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. ~ J.D. Salinger

To outlive one's child is a terrible thing, but to do so because your child has taken his or her life is horrible. ~ Pierre Salinger

She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years. ~ J.D. Salinger

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake
especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all. ~ J.D. Salinger

He took two steps at a time, but slowly, holding onto the banister, putting his whole body into it, as if the act of climbing a flight of stairs was for him, as it is for many children, a moderately pleasurable end in itself. ~ J.D. Salinger

The catcher in the rye ... that's all I really want to be ... ~ J.D. Salinger

Who the Hell is Lane? he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admiti that he know the first names of certain people. ~ J.D. Salinger

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 ~ J.D. Salinger

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars. I didn't care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn't know me and I didn't know anybody. I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody'd think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they'd leave me alone. ~ J.D. Salinger

Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don't just go up to somebody and say, 'You're a terrific whistler. ~ J.D. Salinger

Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you're able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can't you use the same energy to stay well and busy? ~ J.D. Salinger

He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism ... ~ J.D. Salinger

is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield ~ J.D. Salinger

You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth. ~ J.D. Salinger

Nobody knows how to do it except the Egyptians. Even modern science. ~ J.D. Salinger

A lot of people criticize the primaries, but I think they are absolutely essential to the education of the President of the United States. ~ Pierre Salinger

I cut going there entirely, gradually. ~ J.D. Salinger

When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door. I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl
not Frances, not anyone I've ever known
and I'll bolt the door. I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me
that one about being chartless
and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me
that one about the little lamb that made thee
and I'll bolt the door. She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door. ~ J.D. Salinger

It makes me so depressed I go crazy. ~ J.D. Salinger

The things that stand out are often the oddities. ~ Pierre Salinger

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. ~ J.D. Salinger

You're a real prince. You're a gentleman and a scholar, kid. ~ J.D. Salinger

I never bore people I haven't known for at least a thousand years. ~ J.D. Salinger

I've met the girl. She's a zero in my opinion but terrific-looking. I don't actually know that she's a zero. I mean she hardly said two words the night I met her. Just sat and smiled and smoked, so it isn't fair to say. ~ J.D. Salinger

I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing. ~ J.D. Salinger

Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy. ~ 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

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal. ~ J.D. Salinger

It's boring to do that every two minutes. ~ J.D. Salinger

I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school. ~ J.D. Salinger

I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. ~ J.D. Salinger

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing "Come All Ye Faithful" like mad. Big deal. It's supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can't see anything religious or pretty, for God's sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would've puked if he could see it. ~ J.D. Salinger

Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things - doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. ~ J.D. Salinger

That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head - and I could not get it out - that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping - and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge - when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway - is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly ...
I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while - just once in a while - there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! ~ J.D. Salinger

But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter. ~ J.D. Salinger

Whole generations have forgotten history. ~ Pierre Salinger

He could hear me alright ... but he didn't answer me right away. He was the kind of guy that hates to answer you right away. ~ J.D. Salinger

We are required only to keep looking. ~ J.D. Salinger

I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. ~ J.D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger, the greatly loved author who "had elected to silence himself. He had freedom of speech but what he had ended up wanting more than anything else, it seemed, was the freedom to be silent. ~ Michael Hofmann

The thing is, though, I don't like the idea. It stinks, if you analyze it. I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. ~ J.D. Salinger

I may be plucky, but I am not stupid. ~ Pierre Salinger

I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face. ~ J.D. Salinger

In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw. ~ J.D. Salinger

I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I? ~ J.D. Salinger

This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one. ~ J.D. Salinger

It's history. It's poetry. ~ J.D. Salinger

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage. ~ J.D. Salinger

Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear. ~ J.D. Salinger

God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be. ~ J.D. Salinger

The one that sang, old Janine, was always whispering into the g***** microphone before she sang. She'd say, 'And now we like to geeve you our impression of Vooly Voo Fransay. Eet ees the story of leetle Fransh girl who comes to a beeg ceety, just like New York, and falls een love wees a leetle boy from Brookleen. We hope you like eet.' Then, when she was all done whispering and being cute as hell, she'd sing some dopey song, half in English and half in French, and drive all the phonies in the place mad with joy. ~ J.D. Salinger

Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can't imagine. I started sweating like a bastard – my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie." And then when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I'd thank him. ~ J.D. Salinger

Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it. ~ J.D. Salinger

Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason. ~ J.D. Salinger

Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid. ~ J.D. Salinger

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it. ~ J.D. Salinger

I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about. ~ J.D. Salinger

I took her dress over to the closet and hung it up. It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up. I thought of her going in a store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably just thought she was a regular girl when she bought it. It made me feel sad as hell- I don't know why exactly. ~ J.D. Salinger

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? ~ 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

Me, myself and I. ~ J.D. Salinger

But doctors talk about cells as if they had such unlimited importance all by themselves. As if they didn't really belong to the person that has them." Teddy brushed back his hair from his forehead with one hand. "I grew my own body," he said. "Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously, at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because - obviously - I've used it. ~ J.D. Salinger

I spent a little more than five months in Vienna. I danced. I went ice skating and skiing. For strenuous exercise, I argued with an Englishman. ~ J.D. Salinger

Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.
Franny was among the first of the girls to get off the train, from a car at the far, northern end of the platform. Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth. ~ J.D. Salinger

As much as I liked and admired the various members of the Kennedy family, my first loyalty was to Jackie. ~ Pierre Salinger

How'd she happen to mention me? Does she do to B.M. now? She said she might go there. she said she might go to Shipley, too. I thought she went to Shipley. how'd she happen to mention me?"
- Personally after reading chapters 1-5 and learning about Jane and Holden's relationship as friends or just to people you can tell that obviously he does truly care about this girl. To make situations between Holden and Stradlater I see jealousy come with in the mix when a date between "Strad" and jane come up to holden during one of there normal horsing around moods ~ J.D. Salinger

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding. ~ J.D. Salinger

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people ... Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. ~ J.D. Salinger

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was… The only thing that would be different would be you. ~ J.D. Salinger

People never believe you. ~ J.D. Salinger

I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you. ~ J.D. Salinger

If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly. ~ J.D. Salinger

He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in. ~ J.D. Salinger

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ J.D. Salinger

It's full of phonies and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a golden Cadillac ... ~ J.D. Salinger

Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. These were not fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York.
Salinger was nothing like I'd thought. Nothing.
Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all. pg192 ~ Joanna Rakoff

I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me. ~ J.D. Salinger

Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much. ~ J.D. Salinger

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. ~ J.D. Salinger

The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die. ~ J.D. Salinger

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. ~ J.D. Salinger

Did you know, God damn it, that Les was all for bringing a tangerine in to you last night before he went to bed? My God. Even Bessie can't stand stories with tangerines in them. And God knows I can't. If you're going to go on with this breakdown business, I wish to hell you'd go back to college to have it. Where you're not the baby of the family. And where, God knows, nobody'll have any urges to bring you any tangerines. And where you don't keep your goddam tap shoes in the closet. ~ J.D. Salinger

-Ех, как ми се иска да се ожениш!- възкликна ненадейно майка му със замечтан глас.
Всички в семейството – ясно, че и Зуи – познаваха склонността на госпожа Глас към нелогични изказвания. Тя се развихряше най-силно и най-величествено насред точно такива бурни, емоционални пререкания. Обаче този път свари Зуи неподготвен. Той издаде експлозивен звук, най-вече през носа – беше или смях, или точно обратното на смеха. Госпожа Глас се наведе бързо и тревожно напред, за да разбере какво е. Беше по-скоро смях и тя се облегна назад с облекчение.
-Ами иска ми се! – настоя тя. – Защо не се ожениш?
Зуи се поотпусна, извади сгъната ленена кърпичка от джоба на панталона си, разгъна я със замах и се изсекна в нея веднъж, два, три пъти. Прибра кърпичката и каза:
-Много обичам да пътувам с влак. Ожениш ли се, не можеш вече да се вредиш да седнеш до прозореца.
-Що за причина!
-Идеална причина е. Махай се, Беси. Остави ме на мира тук.

"I wish you'd get married," Mrs. Glass said, abruptly, wistfully. '
Everyone in the Glass family-Zooey certainly not last was familiar with this sort of non-sequitur from Mrs. Glass. It bloomed best, most sublimely, in the middle of an emotional flareup of just this kind. This time, it caught Zooey very much off guard, however. He gave an explosive sound, mostly through the nose, of either laughter or the opposite of laughter. Mrs. Glass quickly and anxiously leaned forward to see which it was. It was laughter, more ~ J.D. Salinger

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. ~ J.D. Salinger

It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl - somebody in my dorm, for example, - he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know, not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making.
And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way. ~ J.D. Salinger

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. ~ Bob Shacochis

You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you. ~ J.D. Salinger

Mattie," he said silently to no one in the room, "you're a little girl. But nobody stays a little girl or a little boy long - take me, for instance. All of a sudden little girls wear lipstick, all of a sudden little boys shave and smoke. So it's a quick business, being a kid. Today you're ten years old, running to meet me in the snow, ready, so ready, to coast down Spring Street with me; tomorrow you'll be twenty, with guys sitting in the living room waiting to take you out. All of a sudden you'll have to tip porters, you'll worry about expensive clothes, meet girls for lunch, wonder why you can't find a guy who's right for you. And that's all as it should be. But my point, Mattie - if I have a point, Mattie - is this: kind of try to live up to the best that's in you. If you give your word to people, let them know that they're getting the word of the best. If you room with some dopey girl at college, try to make her less dopey. If you're standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you've got a buck - but only if you can do it without patronizing her. That's the trick, baby. I could tell you a lot, Mat, but I wouldn't be sure that I'm right. You're a little girl, but you understand me. You're going to be smart when you grow up. But if you can't be smart and a swell girl, too, then I don't want to see you grow up. Be a swell girl, Mat. ~ J.D. Salinger

America Held Hostage won 24 Emmys for ABC News, but someone forgot to include my name on the list of people responsible for the show. ~ Pierre Salinger

It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain. ~ J.D. Salinger

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc. ~ J.D. Salinger

I kept picturing all these little kids in this big field of rye ... If they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. ~ J.D. Salinger