J D Salinger Quotes

“I just hope that one day - preferably when we’re both blind drunk - we can talk about it.”
― J.D. Salinger

“I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“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, The Catcher in the Rye

“If you're not in
the mood, you can't do that stuff right.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“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.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of trying to make me happy”
― J.D. Salinger

“I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.”
― J.D. Salinger

“I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."
Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though...
"What the hellya reading?"
"Goddamn book."
He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name on it. "Any good?" he said.
"This sentence I'm reading is terrific.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I also say "Boy" a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and some times I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?’ he asked. ‘You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are.”
― J.D. Salinger

“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“a stunning glimpse of Buddy, at a later date by innumerable years, quite bereft of my dubious, loving company, writing about this very party on a very large, jet-black, very moving, gorgeous typewriter. He is smoking a cigarette, occasionally clasping his hands and placing them on the top of his head in a thoughtful, exhausted manner. His hair is gray; he is older than you are now, Les! The veins in his hands are slightly prominent in the glimpse, so I have not mentioned the matter to him at all, partially considering his youthful prejudice against veins showing in poor adults’ hands. So it goes. You would think this particular glimpse would pierce the casual witness’s heart to the quick, disabling him utterly, so that he could not bring himself to discuss the glimpse in the least with his beloved, broadminded family. This is not exactly the case; it mostly makes me take an exceedingly deep breath as a simple, brisk measure against getting dizzy. It is his room that pierces me more than anything else. It is all his youthful dreams realized to the full! It has one of those beautiful windows in the ceiling that he has always, to my absolute knowledge, fervently admired from a splendid reader’s distance! All round about him, in addition, are exquisite shelves to hold his books, equipment, tablets, sharp pencils, ebony, costly typewriter, and other stirring, personal effects. Oh, my God, he will be overjoyed when he sees that room, mark my words! It is one of the most smiling, comforting glimpses of my entire life and quite possibly with the least strings attached. In a reckless manner of speaking, I would far from object if that were practically the last glimpse of my life.”
― J.D. Salinger, Hapworth 16, 1924

“Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect.”
― J.D. Salinger

“So what do you think?’ He asked, holding up the book.
‘I think Salinger is a closet paedophile,’ I replied placidly and was surprised and comforted by this minuscule, acidic, bitter Sylvia Plath like mocking, sniping tone that had crept into my voice. ‘The main character Seymour is a fully grown man and a pervert who befriends young girls with his storytelling and swimming, just to get close enough to groom them in preparation for the inevitable sexual assault he lusts after. You might have noticed for example in A Perfect Day For Bananafish he grabs the young girls-’
‘Sybil.’
‘He grabs Sybil’s ankles while lying on the beach and again when he pushes her in the water,’ I continued. ‘He goes too far when he kisses the bottom of her foot which makes even a four-year-old yell out in fear, knowing a line had been crossed. Frustrated Seymour walks away and goes back to his hotel where he kills himself in shame.”
― J.D. Gallagher

“«Mais tu ferais mieux de t’y mettre tout de suite, ma fille. On a à peine le temps de faire un mouvement que le sablier est déjà vide, tu sais. Crois-moi, je sais de quoi je parle. Tu auras eu de la veine si tu trouves le temps d’éternuer dans ce monde incroyable.»”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
― J. D. Salinger

“If Death - who was out there all the time, possibly sitting on the hood - 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. Chances were, you could take your cigar with you, if it was a clear Havana.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“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, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I've mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitues, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction