Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “What I liked about her, she didn’t give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.”

— J.D. Salinger

452. “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

453. “I know that sounds mean to say, but I don’t mean it mean.”

— J.D. Salinger

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

458. “I wasn’t sleepy or anything, but I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wished I was dead.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

467. “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

468. “I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”

— J.D. Salinger

469. “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

470. “Then she introduced me to the Navy guy. His name was Commander Blop or something. He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you.”

— J.D. Salinger

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “If Death – who was out there all the time, possibly sitting on the hood – if Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly. Chances were, you could take your cigar with you, if it was a clear Havana.”

— J.D. Salinger

476. “He took two steps at a time, but slowly, holding onto the banister, putting his whole body into it, as if the act of climbing a flight of stairs was for him, as it is for many children, a moderately pleasurable end in itself.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

478. “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

479. “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

480. “So I went in this cheap-looking restaurant and had doughnuts and coffee. Only, I didn’t eat the doughnuts. I couldn’t swallow them too well. The thing is, if you get very depressed about something, it’s hard as hell to swallow.”

— J.D. Salinger

481. “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

482. “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

483. “I don’t get hardly anything out of anything. I’m in bad shape. I’m in lousy shape.”

— J.D. Salinger

484. “Don’t you think there’s a time and place for everything? Don’t you think if someone starts out to tell you about his father’s farm, he should stick to his guns, then get around to telling you about his uncle’s brace? Or, if his uncle’s brace is such a provocative subject, shouldn’t he have selected it in the first place as his subject – not the farm?”

— J.D. Salinger

485. “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’d 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 know it’s crazy.”

— J.D. Salinger

486. “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

487. “You dirty little bookworm.”

— J.D. Salinger

488. “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

489. “La gente non fa caso mai a niente.”

— J.D. Salinger

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong.”

— J.D. Salinger

494. “That’s what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch. It mad me so damn sad when I thought about it, their never going anywhere swanky for lunch or anything. I knew it wasn’t too important, but it made me sad anyway.”

— J.D. Salinger

495. “I felt like giving old Jane a buzz.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

497. “People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.”

— J.D. Salinger

498. “Jesus realised there is no separation from God.”

— J.D. Salinger

499. “First of all, he knows I don’t drink. Second, he knows I was born in New York and that if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s atmosphere. Third, he knows I live about seventy goddam blocks from the Village. And fourth, I told him three times I was in my pajamas and slippers.”

— J.D. Salinger

500. “I don’t know, boy. I don’t know.′ I hate it when somebody answers that way.”

— J.D. Salinger