Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.”

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

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

— J.D. Salinger

119. “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

120. “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

121. “Life is a gift horse in my opinion.”

— J.D. Salinger

122. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

125. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

127. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

129. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

132. “Did you see more glass?”

— J.D. Salinger

133. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

139. “Seymour once said to me – in a crosstown bus, of all places – that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.”

— J.D. Salinger

140. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

144. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

146. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

149. “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

150. “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