Top 341 Quotes & Sayings by J. D. Salinger - Page 2

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

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

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

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not.

I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected - never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.

She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something. Jane was different. We'd get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we'd start holding hands, and we wouldn't quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

I could happily lie down and die sometimes.

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.

I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.

It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.

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

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.

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.

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

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.

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.

You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.

Why's it so sunny?" she repeated. Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.

That's something that annoys the hell out of me-I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't.

People are always ruining things for you.

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

Give me an honest con man any day.

I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood.

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.

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

God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead?

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

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.

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.

Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?

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.

I just hope that one day - preferably when we’re both blind drunk - we can talk about it.

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.

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.

I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.

There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked.

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

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.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.

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.

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.

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.

Sleep tight, ya morons!

I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.

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.

I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. Sometimes, I act a lot older than I am--I really do. But people never notice it. People never notice anything.