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. SALINGERI told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I’m crazy. I swear to God I am.
More J. D. Salinger Quotes
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I just hope that one day – preferably when we’re both blind drunk – we can talk about it.
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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.
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Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.
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Why’s it so sunny? she repeated. Zooey observed her rather narrowly. I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy, he said.
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You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.
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He said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.
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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.
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People are always ruining things for you.
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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.
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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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Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.
J. D. SALINGER -
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?
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We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.
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I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
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You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.
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If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.
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I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.
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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.
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That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.
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I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.
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It’s not too bad when the sun’s out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
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I could happily lie down and die sometimes.
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I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
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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.
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I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
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You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
J. D. SALINGER