Top 400 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, 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

102. “But you can’t always tell – with somebody’s mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.”

— J.D. Salinger

103. “But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most. I mean you can’t help it sometimes.”

— J.D. Salinger

104. “Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip!”

— J.D. Salinger

105. “How old are you? I asked her. “Old enough to know better.” she said.”

— J.D. Salinger

106. “Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”

— J.D. Salinger

107. “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

108. “I wouldn’t exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though.”

— J.D. Salinger

109. “The little girl on the plane Who turned her doll’s head around To look at me.”

— J.D. Salinger

110. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”

— J.D. Salinger

111. “Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.”

— J.D. Salinger

112. “Women kill me. They really do. I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that – although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They’re always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.”

— J.D. Salinger

113. “I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete – that’s what scares me.”

— J.D. Salinger

114. “You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth.”

— J.D. Salinger

115. “Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.”

— J.D. Salinger

116. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

117. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

118. “I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

121. “Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’”

— J.D. Salinger

122. “People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you’re not.”

— J.D. Salinger

123. “The Laughing Man’ was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.”

— J.D. Salinger

124. “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?”

— J.D. Salinger

125. “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”

— J.D. Salinger

126. “Did you see more glass?”

— J.D. Salinger

127. “His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them.”

— J.D. Salinger

128. “If there is an amateur reader still left in the world – or anybody who just reads and runs – I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”

— J.D. Salinger

129. “Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.”

— J.D. Salinger

130. “The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

— J.D. Salinger

131. “How long should a man’s legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.”

— J.D. Salinger

132. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

133. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

134. “You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books.”

— J.D. Salinger

135. “He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.”

— J.D. Salinger

136. “Then I tried to get them in a little intelligent conversation, but it was practically impossible.”

— J.D. Salinger

137. “I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete – that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

— J.D. Salinger

138. “You’re a student – whether that idea appeals to you or not. You’re in love with knowledge.”

— J.D. Salinger

139. “I was surrounded by jerks. I’m not kidding.”

— J.D. Salinger

140. “For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.”

— J.D. Salinger

141. “We have to live a life that is more revolutionary than that of the revolutionaries.”

— J.D. Salinger

142. “The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.”

— J.D. Salinger

143. “I get lonesome up there,” I told him. “I picked a lousy profession. If I ever write a novel I think I’ll join a choir or something and run to meetings between chapters.”

— J.D. Salinger

144. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

145. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

146. “I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while – just once in a while – there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word ‘wisdom’ mentioned!”

— J.D. Salinger

147. “But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.”

— J.D. Salinger

148. “I don’t want to scare you,” he said, “but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.”

— J.D. Salinger

149. “I don’t even know what I was running for – I guess I just felt like it.”

— J.D. Salinger

150. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”

— J.D. Salinger