J.D. Salinger Quotes (158 Quotes)

Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.

In the first place, you're way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.

Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.

Every time you mention some guy that's strictly a bastard- very mean, or very conceited and all- and when you mention it to the girl, she'll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn't keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion.

I knew a lot of guys at Pencey I thought were a lot handsomer than Stradlater, but they wouldn't look handsome if you saw their pictures in the Year Book. They'd look like they had big noses or their ears stuck out.

I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen

Lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most.

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.

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.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

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.

You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled , what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and--well, we iron things out together, that's all.

They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way.

Finally, though, I'd leave the room without even taking a sock at him. I'd probably go down to the can and sneak a cigarette and watch myself getting tough in the mirror. Anyway, that's what I thought about the whole way back to the hotel. It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. i think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves.

I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around.

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.

My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.

You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

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.

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.

Why do we have to get up at five? The war's over, for God's sake.

Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.

I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.

I'm the one flunking out of this goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition.

Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all.

That's what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch. It mad me so damn sad when I thought about it, their never going anywhere swanky for lunch or anything. I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.

You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books.

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

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.

You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac-with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

God, I wish you could have been there.

I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.

In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.

People always clap for the wrong reasons.

The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be...

You keep records of their troubles. You'll learn from them. If you want to Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education, it's history.

I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.

Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies

Zooey said... It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.

All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you.

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.

I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

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

People always think something's all true.

The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding

You remember I said before that Ackley was a slob in his personal habits? Well, so was Stradlater, but in a different way. Stradlater was more of a secret slob. He always looked all right, Stradlater, but for instance, you should've seen the razor he shaved himself with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap. He never cleaned it or anything. He always looked good when he was finished fixing himself up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did