J.D. Salinger Quotes (158 Quotes)

For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.

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.

Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you're able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can't you use the same energy to stay well and busy?

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

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

I held hands with her all the time...that doesn't sound like much, I realize, but 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.

If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.

Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip!

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.

Where do the ducks go in the winter?

For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. 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. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

You can't exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.

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.

Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away.

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all… 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

If you weren't around, I'd probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddamn place. You're the only reason I'm around, practically.

Life is a game. Life is a game that one plays according to rules.

That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.

Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that-although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.

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.