Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.”

— J.D. Salinger

452. “Sir, we ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and pictures in the temple.’ Rama Krishna: ‘That’s the way with you Calcutta people. You want to teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves. Do you think God does not know that He is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?”

— J.D. Salinger

453. “That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places.”

— J.D. Salinger

454. “I never bore people I haven’t known for at least a thousand years.”

— J.D. Salinger

455. “So what I did was, I went over and bought two orchestra seats for I Know My Love. It was a benefit performance or something. I didn’t much want to see it, but I knew old Sally, the queen of phonies, would start drooling all over the place when I told her I had tickets for that, because the Lunts were in it and all. She liked shows that are supposed to be very sophisticated and dry and all, with the Lunts and all.”

— J.D. Salinger

456. “Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”

— J.D. Salinger

457. “We are required only to keep looking.”

— J.D. Salinger

458. “The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?”

— J.D. Salinger

459. “That’s what makes me so mad! I could just spit! It’s like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something...”

— J.D. Salinger

460. “Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

461. “You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play in the goddam closet.”

— J.D. Salinger

462. “I went over to my window and opened it and packed a snowball with my bare hands. The snow was very good for packing. I didn’t throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed my mind. The car looked so nice and white. Then I started to throw it at a hydrant, but that looked too nice and white, too. Finally I didn’t throw it at anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

463. “You always got these very lumpy mashed potatoes on steak night, and for dessert you got Brown Betty, which nobody ate, except maybe the little kids in the lower school that didn’t know any better – and guys like Ackley that ate everything.”

— J.D. Salinger

464. “I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.”

— J.D. Salinger

465. “Presently, some sort of fish was served to me on a plate with a small but noticeable trace of coagulated catsup along the border. Mme. Yoshoto asked me, in English – and her accent was unexpectedly charming – if I would prefer an egg, but I said, “Non, non, madame – merci!” I said I never ate eggs. M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper against my water glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate and I systematically swallowed in silence.”

— J.D. Salinger

466. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

467. “The trouble is,′ Teddy said, ’most people don’t want to see things the way they are.”

— J.D. Salinger

468. “The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has – I’m not kidding. Anyway, I kept standing next to that crazy cannon, looking down at the game and freezing my ass off. Only, I wasn’t watching the game too much. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that.”

— J.D. Salinger

469. “Though we’ve talked and talked and talked, we’ve all agreed not to say a word.”

— J.D. Salinger

470. “I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.”

— J.D. Salinger

471. “I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.”

— J.D. Salinger

472. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

473. “High, I think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw the last shot he made. Yes. Oui.”

— J.D. Salinger

474. “One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies.”

— J.D. Salinger

475. “The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phony every minute.”

— J.D. Salinger

476. “I mean – she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping.”

— J.D. Salinger

477. “What he was doing, he was giving her a feel under the table, and at the same time telling her about some guy in his dorm that had eaten a whole bottle of aspirin and nearly committed suicide. His date kept saying to him, “How horrible... Don’t, darling. Please, don’t. Not here.” Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me.”

— J.D. Salinger

478. “Lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most.”

— J.D. Salinger

479. “Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.”

— J.D. Salinger

480. “Mi fanno impazzire i libri che quando hai finito di leggerli vorresti che l’autore fosse il tuo migliore amico, per telefonargli ogni volta che ti va.”

— J.D. Salinger

481. “If you were only around six years old, you could get liquor at Ernie’s, the place was so dark and all, and besides, nobody cared how old you were. You could even be a dope fiend and nobody’d care.”

— J.D. Salinger

482. “Who the Hell is Lane?” he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admiti that he know the first names of certain people.”

— J.D. Salinger

483. “What a school. You were always watching somebody cut their damn toenails or squeeze their pimples or something.”

— J.D. Salinger

484. “Hay personas a las que no se debe tomar el pelo, aunque se lo merezcan.”

— J.D. Salinger

485. “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

486. “I’m pretty sure he yelled “Good luck!” at me. I hope not. I hope to hell not. I’d never yell “Good luck!” at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it.”

— J.D. Salinger

487. “All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself.”

— J.D. Salinger

488. “I was a proper snob in college, as only an old Wise Child alumnus and future lifetime English-major can be, and 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

489. “You keep talking about ego. My God, it would take Christ himself to decide what’s ego and what isn’t. This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t.”

— J.D. Salinger

490. “Le madri sono tutte un po’ fuori di testa.”

— J.D. Salinger

491. “I could feel a terrific lecture coming on. I didn’t mind the idea so much, but I didn’t feel like being lectured to and smell Vicks Nose Drops and look at old Spencer in his pajamas and bathrobe all at the same time. I really didn’t.”

— J.D. Salinger

492. “He told us we should always pray to God- talk to Him and all- wherever we were. He told us to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car.”

— J.D. Salinger

493. “Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”

— J.D. Salinger

494. “If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer.”

— J.D. Salinger

495. “However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; however immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; however incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.”

— J.D. Salinger

496. “I go mostly because I’m tired as hell of getting up furious in the morning and going to bed furious at night.”

— J.D. Salinger

497. “If he was so goddam stupid not to realize it was Saturday night and everybody was out or asleep or home for the week end, I wasn’t going to break my neck telling him.”

— J.D. Salinger

498. “I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.”

— J.D. Salinger

499. “You dirty little bookworm.”

— J.D. Salinger

500. “He was one of those bald guys that comb all their hair over from the side to cover up the baldness. I’d rather be bald than do that.”

— J.D. Salinger