J. D. Salinger Quotes
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The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding
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There are still a few men who love desperately.
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If you're not in the mood, you can't do that stuff right.
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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.
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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.
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I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
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Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)
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Are all your stars shining?
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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?
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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.
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There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
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For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
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Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.
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Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip!
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His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them
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Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.
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Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.
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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.
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It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've never seen such a bunch of apple-eaters.
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She really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over - anywhere - her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows, and all, her ears - her whole face except her mouth and all.
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And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
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She's quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that's what she is, roller-skate skinny. You'd like her.
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The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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