Top 400 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

253. “I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something.”

— J.D. Salinger

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

260. “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

261. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

272. “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

273. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

275. “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

276. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

279. “The mark of a mature man is not willing to die for a worthy cause, rather it’s willing to live for one.”

— J.D. Salinger

280. “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

281. “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

282. “Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

285. “I mean if thousands of little kids are running and they do not look where they are going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day, I just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but this is the only thing that I really like to do!”

— J.D. Salinger

286. “We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.”

— J.D. Salinger

287. “He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”

— J.D. Salinger

288. “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

289. “Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

291. “He was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody’s question.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

293. “It makes me so depressed I go crazy.”

— J.D. Salinger

294. “Ah, Sharon Lipschutz,” said the young man. “How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire.”

— J.D. Salinger

295. “The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white – unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister’s expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her – a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.”

— J.D. Salinger

296. “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

297. “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

298. “This fall I think you’re riding for – it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

— J.D. Salinger

299. “The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited. Even smart girls do it.”

— J.D. Salinger

300. “You hate to tell new stuff to somebody around a hundred years old. They don’t like to hear it.”

— J.D. Salinger