Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

255. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

261. “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

262. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

264. “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

265. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

271. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

275. “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

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. “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

279. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

298. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger