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. SALINGERHe 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.
More J. D. Salinger Quotes
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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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I love to write and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.
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I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.
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Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
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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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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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Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
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I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.
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Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear 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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You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
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You don’t know how to talk to people you don’t like. Don’t love, really. You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.
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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 have scars on my hands from touching certain people.
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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.
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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 so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.
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There are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.
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It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.
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I could happily lie down and die sometimes.
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I don’t even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.
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All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
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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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Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
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I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen. Sometimes, I act a lot older than I am–I really do. But people never notice it. People never notice anything.
J. D. SALINGER