J. d. salinger quotes
Explore a curated collection of J. d. salinger's most famous quotes. Dive into timeless reflections that offer deep insights into life, love, and the human experience through his profound words.
Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. 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. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
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.
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.
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.
But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.
She was not one for emptying her face of expression.
Poets are always taking the weather so personally.
There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked.
Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.
I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.
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'm up to my ears in unwritten words.
Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.
People always clap for the wrong reasons.
I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do
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.
Are all your stars shining?
I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.
I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.
The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?
I drew laughing, high-breasted girls aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens.
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.
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.
Where do the ducks go in the winter?
Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.
It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
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 knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
Who in the Bible besides 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?
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.
It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
There are still a few men who love desperately.
I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
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.
You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.
Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.
That's something that annoys the hell out of me-I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't.
Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.
One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.
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 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.
She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
People never notice anything.
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.
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'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.
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.
If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.
Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly
You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.
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.
We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).
People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not.
Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.
Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.
Oh, this happiness is strong stuff.
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.
I could happily lie down and die sometimes.
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
God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.
I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood.
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.
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.
Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
Sleep tight, ya morons!
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?' Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.
If a body catch a body coming through the rye.
I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies
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.
Why's it so sunny?" she repeated. Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.
How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire
I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.
But if we come back, if German men come back, if British men come back, and Japs, and French, and all the other men, all of us talking, writing, painting, making movies of heroes, and cockroaches and foxholes and blood, then future generations will always be doomed to future Hitlers. It's never occurred to boys to have contempt for wars, to point to soldiers' pictures in history books, laughing at them. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.
I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.
Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.
Mothers are all slightly insane.
You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear.
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.
You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.
Money always ends up making you blue.
I just hope that one day - preferably when we’re both blind drunk - we can talk about it.
I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.
Give me an honest con man any day.
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.
The world is full of actors pretending to be human
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.
People are always ruining things for you.
She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
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.
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 don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.
How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.
I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.
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.
The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.
The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
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?
God, I wish you could have been there.
I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I'm crazy. I swear to God I am.
Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.
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.
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.
I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know.
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
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.
That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.
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?
Happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
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.
You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
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.