J. D. Salinger Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back "What?"

J. D. Salinger
But you can't always tell - with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.

J. D. Salinger
What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can't believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It's a prissy word invented by the clergy.

J. D. Salinger
I can't see why anybody — unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim — would even want to say a prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls — but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that — but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.

J. D. Salinger
I don't hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hate them once in a while—I admit it—but it doesn't last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn't see them, if they didn't come in the room, or if I didn't see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them.

J. D. Salinger
But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end.

J. D. Salinger
I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.

J. D. Salinger
Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away.

J. D. Salinger
"You know Adam?" Teddy asked him.
"Do I know who?"
"Adam. In the Bible."
Nicholson smiled. "Not personally," he said dryly.

J. D. Salinger
I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.

J. D. Salinger
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
I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about.

J. D. Salinger
It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.

J. D. Salinger
It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.

J. D. Salinger
Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.'

J. D. Salinger
I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do

J. D. Salinger
Even the most sublimely accomplished non-stop talker can't consistently please.

J. D. Salinger
If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.

J. D. Salinger
If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

J. D. Salinger
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.

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

J. D. Salinger
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
It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.

J. D. Salinger
But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes.

J. D. Salinger
It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.

J. D. Salinger
It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.

J. D. Salinger
"I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when car was in motion.
"I beg your pardon?" said the woman.
"I said I see you're looking at my feet".
"I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor," said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.
"If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don't be a God-damned sneak about it."
"Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.
The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back.
"I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the young man.

J. D. Salinger
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
Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.

J. D. Salinger
He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes — fools, no.

J. D. Salinger