Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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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. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

454. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

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

— 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 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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “It may very well be that I hate like hell to play Martha to somebody else’s Mary.”

— J.D. Salinger

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

485. “I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something.”

— J.D. Salinger

486. “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way all Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

— J.D. Salinger

487. “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

488. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

490. “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

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. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

495. “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

496. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

498. “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

499. “It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself.”

— J.D. Salinger

500. “He says the only people he ever really wants to meet fort a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. He says he never even wants to have lunch with anybody, even, unless he thinks there’s a good chance it’s going to turn out to be Jesus, the person- or the Buddha, or Huineng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that.”

— J.D. Salinger