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J. D. Salinger Quotes

Total quotes: 59
“And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: explanation, Meaning, Comfort
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Goodbyes, Sad, Leave, Farewells
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Immature, mature, maturity vs. immaturity, Life, People
“You know what you do? Would you like me to tell you what you do? You actually go out of your way to torture yourself.”
— J. D. Salinger, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes
Tagged: Torture, Anxiety
“God damn it, there are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Tagged: Appreciation, Life is Meaningful
“...and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Tagged: Grief, delight, happiness and unhappiness, Experience, Life
“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Girls, Woman Quotes, Lady, female
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. All I know about it is, I sort of miss everybody I told about…It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Missing Someone, Truth and Honesty
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Tagged: Change Quotes, manipulation
“I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Sincerity, unaware
“If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“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.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: cold, Disappearing
“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, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
Tagged: Pain, Sufferings, Scars, Experience, Life
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Tagged: Attachment, Relationship, Connection
“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
“The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”
— J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
“I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want — some bastard with wavy hair?”
— J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“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 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
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