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J. D. Salinger Quotes
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He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.
J. D. Salinger
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The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts.
J. D. Salinger
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Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?
J. D. Salinger
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I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. Salinger
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When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer — you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission.
J. D. Salinger
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It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.
J. D. Salinger
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It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.
J. D. Salinger
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The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.
J. D. Salinger
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There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. … It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. … I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. … I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
J. D. Salinger
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This is a people shooting hat," I said. "I shoot people in this hat.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish that 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.
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I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake—especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.
J. D. Salinger
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I said old Jesus probably would've puked if He could see it - all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra.
J. D. Salinger
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He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
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You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.
J. D. Salinger
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
J. D. Salinger
Born:
January 1, 1919
Died:
January 27, 2010
(aged 91)
Bio:
Jerome David Salinger was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980.
Known for:
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Franny and Zooey (1961)
Nine Stories (1953)
For Esmé—with Love and Squalor (1950)
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