Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “What’re you majoring in?” I asked him. “Perverts?” I was only horsing around. “What’re you trying to be – funny?”

— J.D. Salinger

252. “It’s so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands of times. Just because they don’t remember, it doesn’t mean they haven’t done it.”

— J.D. Salinger

253. “Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot.”

— J.D. Salinger

254. “I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.”

— J.D. Salinger

255. “Oh, God, if I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy.”

— J.D. Salinger

256. “I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it?”

— J.D. Salinger

257. “A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

258. “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.”

— J.D. Salinger

259. “I mean it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you’re a freak if you try to.”

— J.D. Salinger

260. “Sometimes I talk a little loud when I get excited.”

— J.D. Salinger

261. “I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down.”

— J.D. Salinger

262. “When I really worry about something, I don’t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don’t go. I’m too worried to go. I don’t want to interrupt my worrying to go.”

— J.D. Salinger

263. “What’s the matter with you, buddy? Where are your brains? If you’ve had a freakish education, at least use it, use it. You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness.”

— J.D. Salinger

264. “Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way – I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

— J.D. Salinger

265. “Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.”

— J.D. Salinger

266. “The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”

— J.D. Salinger

267. “Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.”

— J.D. Salinger

268. “Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re Catholic.”

— J.D. Salinger

269. “They gave Sally this little blue butt-twitcher of a dress to wear. She really did look damn good in it, though. I have to admit it. And don’t think she didn’t know it. She kept walking ahead of me, so that I’d see how cute her little ass looked. It did look pretty cute, too. I hate to admit it.”

— J.D. Salinger

270. “God, how I hate it when somebody yells “Good luck!” at me when I’m leaving somewhere. It’s depressing.”

— J.D. Salinger

271. “Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect.”

— J.D. Salinger

272. “Did you ever get fed up?′ I said. ‘I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?”

— J.D. Salinger

273. “If I’d wanted this place to fill up with every fat Irish rose that passes by, I’d’ve said so.”

— J.D. Salinger

274. “I’m sick to death of being the heavy in everybody’s life.”

— J.D. Salinger

275. “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. God I hate that stuff.”

— J.D. Salinger

276. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

277. “Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.”

— J.D. Salinger

278. “She’s quite intelligent, in my stupidity.”

— J.D. Salinger

279. “Poets are always taking the weather so personally.”

— J.D. Salinger

280. “Every tune I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again.”

— J.D. Salinger

281. “Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars. I mean they don’t even interest me. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”

— J.D. Salinger

282. “You’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there.”

— J.D. Salinger

283. “Non voglio spaventarti, ma non stento affatto a vederti morire nobilmente, in un modo o nell’altro, per una causa indicibilmente ignobile.”

— J.D. Salinger

284. “Eight dollars and eighty-five cents. Sixty-five cents. I spent some.”

— J.D. Salinger

285. “Every time you mention some guy that’s strictly a bastard – very mean, or very conceited and all – and when you mention it to the girl, she’ll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn’t keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion.”

— J.D. Salinger

286. “God damn it,” he said, “there are nice things in the world- and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.”

— J.D. Salinger

287. “Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?”

— J.D. Salinger

288. “I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I’m not sophisticated. I’m not anything. I’m just me.”

— J.D. Salinger

289. “Tout le monde est une nonne.”

— J.D. Salinger

290. “You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”

— J.D. Salinger

291. “You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.”

— J.D. Salinger

292. “I’m one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.”

— J.D. Salinger

293. “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they’re only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.”

— J.D. Salinger

294. “It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked at it.”

— J.D. Salinger

295. “Si haces algo demasiado bien, o te andas con cuidado, o con el tiempo empiezas a querer lucirte y entonces ya no eres tan bueno.”

— J.D. Salinger

296. “He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn’t know why.”

— J.D. Salinger

297. “That’s the terrible part. I swear to God I’m a madman.”

— J.D. Salinger

298. “Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion.”

— J.D. Salinger

299. “I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.”

— J.D. Salinger

300. “I didn’t feel like it. You really have to be in the mood for that stuff.”

— J.D. Salinger