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J. D. Salinger Quotes

Total quotes: 94
“The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. - Mr. Spencer”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing — perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist.”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
“Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“You fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Love, lost, Fall in love
“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, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Life, Theory Of Living, Losing, Passion, Philosophy, strength, Pursuit of Happiness, Psychology, Writers, How To Think
“I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
“I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.”
— J. D. Salinger
“I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“Life is a gift horse in my opinion.”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
“Everybody's a nun.”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“"I never saw so many tigers."”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
“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, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“I know. I’m very hard to talk to. I realize that.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Unlovable, Tired, Sick Of Myself
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“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 only in a different way.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“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, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master — some guru, some holy man — to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“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. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that — and you do — and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. 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.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant — if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“"You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line — in one damn incarnation or another, if you like — you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to — be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to — there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world."”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that 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 and Zooey
“Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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