J D Salinger Quotes

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010)

J. D. Salinger was an American writer best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Before its publication, Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine and served in World War II. (J D Salinger Quotes)

“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
J. D. Salinger

“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”
J. D. Salinger

“Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.”
J. D. Salinger

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. 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. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, 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

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”
J. D. Salinger

“And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”
J. D. Salinger

“As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts.”
J. D. Salinger

“Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.”
J. D. Salinger

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
J. D. Salinger

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
J. D. Salinger

“Everybody in this family gets his goddamn religion in a different package.”
J. D. Salinger

“God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at!”
J. D. Salinger

“I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
J. D. Salinger

“I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them.”
J. D. Salinger

“I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.”
J. D. Salinger

“I didn’t want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.”
J. D. Salinger

“I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”
J. D. Salinger

“I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.”
J. D. Salinger

“I find it magnificent how beautiful, loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with de-cent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength.”
J. D. Salinger

“I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.”
J. D. Salinger

“I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.”
J. D. Salinger

“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.”
J. D. Salinger

“I’m just sick of ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
J. D. Salinger

“I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
J. D. Salinger

“I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”
J. D. Salinger

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
J. D. Salinger

“I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
J. D. Salinger

“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.”
J. D. Salinger

“In a cruel manner of speaking, this young woman may well have lost her head before she was born; it is certainly not on her shoulders at this stage of the game.”
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 funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”
J. D. Salinger

“It’s not too bad when the sun’s out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.”
J. D. Salinger

“It’s really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.”
J. D. Salinger

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

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
J. D. Salinger

“Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way—I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”
J. D. Salinger

“People are always ruining things for you.”
J. D. Salinger

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
J. D. Salinger

“She was not one for emptying her face of expression.”
J. D. Salinger

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
J. D. Salinger

“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 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.”
J. D. Salinger

“That’s the whole trouble. When you’re feeling very depressed, you can’t even think.”
J. D. Salinger

“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 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.”
J. D. Salinger

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
J. D. Salinger

“There isn’t a nightclub in the world that you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you’re with some girl that really knocks you out.”
J. D. Salinger

“The world is full of actors pretending to be human.”
J. D. Salinger

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish 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.”
J. D. Salinger