Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “Then a funny thing happened. When I got to the museum, all of a sudden I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks. It just didn’t appeal to me – and here I’d walked through the whole goddam park and looked forward to it and all. If Phoebe’d been there, I probably would have, but she wasn’t. So all I did, in front of the museum, was get a cab and go down to the Biltmore. I didn’t feel much like going. I’d made that damn date with Sally, though.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

306. “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

307. “Money always ends up making you blue.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

309. “Indeed, all forms of human folly and beastiality touch a very symphathetic chord within our breasts!”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

311. “If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.”

— J.D. Salinger

312. “The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody’d say something smarter than he had.”

— J.D. Salinger

313. “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

314. “It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.”

— J.D. Salinger

315. “As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.”

— J.D. Salinger

316. “When they argue, there can be no danger of a permanent rift, because they’re Mother and Daughter. A terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch.”

— J.D. Salinger

317. “The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.”

— J.D. Salinger

318. “Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

320. “The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling.”

— J.D. Salinger

321. “I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”

— J.D. Salinger

322. “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

323. “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

324. “People always think something’s all true.”

— J.D. Salinger

325. “Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might. If you do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless and joy-making, anything above and beyond the call of theatrical ingenuity, S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons.”

— J.D. Salinger

326. “I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.”

— J.D. Salinger

327. “I think he was pretty surprised to hear from me. I once called him a fat-assed phony.”

— J.D. Salinger

328. “Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.”

— J.D. Salinger

329. “It’s full of phonies and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a golden Cadillac...”

— J.D. Salinger

330. “I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.”

— J.D. Salinger

331. “I could happily lie down and die sometimes.”

— J.D. Salinger

332. “As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure – or even intellectual treasure – and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety percent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”

— J.D. Salinger

333. “How do you know you’re going to do something, untill you do it?”

— J.D. Salinger

334. “Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely.”

— J.D. Salinger

335. “Wow. Death by books. That would have been some way to go.”

— J.D. Salinger

336. “Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.”

— J.D. Salinger

337. “He looked at me with his eyes shining – yes, shining. The boy’s eyes could shine.”

— J.D. Salinger

338. “He once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.”

— J.D. Salinger

339. “Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance.”

— J.D. Salinger

340. “No cuenten nunca nada a nadie. En el momento en que uno cuenta cualquier cosa, empieza a echar de menos a todo el mundo.”

— J.D. Salinger

341. “She had a nice voice. A nice telephone voice, mostly. She should’ve carried a goddamn telephone around with her.”

— J.D. Salinger

342. “I never did find out what the hell was the matter. Some girls you practically never find out what’s the matter.”

— J.D. Salinger

343. “Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls.”

— J.D. Salinger

344. “He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.”

— J.D. Salinger

345. “It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.”

— J.D. Salinger

346. “She’s quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that’s what she is, roller-skate skinny. You’d like her.”

— J.D. Salinger

347. “You keep records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them. If you want to Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education, it’s history.”

— J.D. Salinger

348. “Where you girls from? Don’t answer if you don’t feel like it. I don’t want you to strain yourself.”

— J.D. Salinger

349. “La gente batte sempre le mani per le cose sbagliate.”

— J.D. Salinger

350. “By far the majority of the hundred and eighty-finer poems are immeasurably not light- but high-hearted, and can be read by anyone, anywhere, even aloud in rather progressive orphanages on stormy nights, but I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend the last thirty or thirty-five poems to any living soul who hasn’t died at least twice in his lifetime, preferably slowly.”

— J.D. Salinger