Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

102. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

103. “In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.”

— J.D. Salinger

104. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

106. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

110. “A woman’s body is like a violin and all, and that it takes a terrific musician to play it right.”

— J.D. Salinger

111. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

114. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

122. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

124. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

126. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— 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. “Did you see more glass?”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn’t.”

— J.D. Salinger

138. “My god, there’s absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you’re up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

143. “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

144. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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