J. D. Salinger Quotations | Page 4

For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.

probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. how well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. she was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that

Sleep tight, ya morons!

Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

Mothers are all slightly insane.

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.

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.

Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected - never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

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

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

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.

I’m just sick of ego, ego, 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.

Oh, it's lovely to see you!' Franny said as the cab moved off. 'I've missed you.' The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all.

A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

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.

What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.

It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.

I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead?

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

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.

I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally.

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.

It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.

When I really worry about something, I don’t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don’t go. I’m too worried to go. I don’t want to interrupt my worrying to go.

Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.

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.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

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.

I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.

People never notice anything.

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.

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.

You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.

How do you know your going to do something, untill you do it?

How long should a man's legs be?Long enough to touch the ground.

I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody most of them, and maybe they’re all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.