J. D. Salinger quotes:

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.

...but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God...

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

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.

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.

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.

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.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

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?

What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory.

He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.

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 don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.

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. I know it's crazy.

Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!

Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.

I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you Vince? Not a thing. It's the best thing there is. Just About.

Dunyada hos seyler de var -hakikaten hos seyler yani. Hepsini birden iskalayacak kadar da salagiz biz. Olup biten her seyi hemen o sefil kucuk egolarimiza gonderiyoruz mutemadiyen.

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? Nobody.

...but I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one. I think that if he titters at male writers who wear invisible skirts he does so at his eternal peril. I'll say no more on the subject. This is precisely the sort of confidence that can be easily and juicily Abused."

The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be..."

I'd be the catcher in the rye and all."

I mean if thousands of little kids are running and they do not look where they are going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day, I just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but this is the only thing that I really like to do!"

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. I know it's crazy."

...publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write."

I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one."

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.

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

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?

You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled , what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and--well, we iron things out together, that's all.

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one.

I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -Holden Caulfield

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.

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 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.

I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.

I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.

His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like 'the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo.

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.

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.

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

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.

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

Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.

Life is a gift horse in my opinion.

She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.

I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

Mothers are all slightly insane.

I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.

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

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

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

It's funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they're asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don't. Kids look alright. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look alright.

He could hear me alright...but he didn't answer me right away. He was the kind of guy that hates to answer you right away.

Last month, Dean Sheeter (whose name usually transports Franny when I mention it) approached me with his gracious smile and bull whip, and I am now lecturing to the faculty, their wives, and a few oppressively-deep type undergraduates every Friday on Zen and Mahayana Buddhism. A feat, I haven't a doubt, that will eventually earn me the Eastern Philosophy Chair in Hell.

Mary Jane. Listen. Please, Eloise said, sobbingYou remember our freshman year, and I had that brown-and-yellow dress I bought in Boise, and Miriam Ball told me nobody wore those kind of dresses in New York, and I cried all night? Eloise shook Mary Jane's armI was a nice girl, she pleaded, wasn't I?

A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing.

Semuanya tak ada yang berubah. Satu-satunya yang berubah adalah kita sendiri. Bukan karena kita bertambah umur atau apalah. Bukan begitu. Kita hanya menjadi berbeda, itu saja

She gave me a pain in the ass, but she was very good looking.

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!

I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood.

But I'm Crazy. I swear to God I am.

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.

Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much.

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.

I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human consciousness.

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,...,and he had very red hair.

Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody.

... I was feeling so depressed I didn't even think. That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think

If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.

I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas.

I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

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.

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.

I said old Jesus probably would've puked if He could see it - all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra.

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

Sleep tight, ya morons!

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.

Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.

You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.

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 mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.

Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a toilet seat.

Real ugly girls have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes.

The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.

It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.

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.

I'm up to my ears in unwritten words.

How do you know you're going to do something, untill you do it?

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors. It's hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I mean they were good, but they were too good.

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

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.

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.

I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.

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.

I'm not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him.

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.

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.

She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.

People are always ruining things for you.

That's something that annoys the hell out of me-I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't.