Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “When she was done whispering in the mike and being cute as hell, they’d sing a song half in English and half in French and drive all the phonies in the place mad with joy.”

— J.D. Salinger

352. “Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.”

— J.D. Salinger

353. “Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer’s a goddamn spy.”

— J.D. Salinger

354. “She yelled ‘Good luck!’ at me the same way old Spencer did when I left Pencey. God, how I hate when somebody yells ‘Good luck!’ at me when I’m leaving somewhere. It’s depressing.”

— J.D. Salinger

355. “Mother, darling, don’t yell at me. I can hear you beautifully,” said the girl.”

— J.D. Salinger

356. “I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing.”

— J.D. Salinger

357. “This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I’m still around, but from here on in, for reasons I’m not at liberty to disclose, I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.”

— J.D. Salinger

358. “I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn’t.”

— J.D. Salinger

359. “Aunt – Uh – There’s a war on. Uh – I mean you’ve seen it on the newsreels. I mean you’ve heard it on the radio and all, haven’t you?”

— J.D. Salinger

360. “I began writing eight or ten words of my own on a sheet of paper, in very large letters that I could read without any trouble. I did that for over a month, filling a couple of small, dime-store writing tablets. Then suddenly I quit. For no particular reason. Chiefly, I was saddened by my own ignorance, I think. Then, too, I was a little afraid I was going blind. There’s never just one reason for anything. But, anyway, I quit.”

— J.D. Salinger

361. “They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way.”

— J.D. Salinger

362. “What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in awhile.”

— J.D. Salinger

363. “I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am willing to stay in the dark.”

— J.D. Salinger

364. “A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing.”

— J.D. Salinger

365. “Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”

— J.D. Salinger

366. “I mean he’d keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can’t do that to.”

— J.D. Salinger

367. “She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell – with somebody’s mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.”

— J.D. Salinger

368. “How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of concentrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?”

— J.D. Salinger

369. “Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted-or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect-he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye.”

— J.D. Salinger

370. “I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn’t blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.”

— J.D. Salinger

371. “I’ll tell you a terrible secret – Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”

— J.D. Salinger

372. “That’s depressing, when somebody says “please” to you.”

— J.D. Salinger

373. “You never get to sit next to the window any more when you’re married.”

— J.D. Salinger

374. “I’m sorry, I’m awful, I’ve just felt so terribly destructive all week. It’s awful. I’m horrible.”

— J.D. Salinger

375. “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.”

— J.D. Salinger

376. “Almost every damn school in the world gets out earlier for Christmas break than the school I go to.”

— J.D. Salinger

377. “Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself, even if Id wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.”

— J.D. Salinger

378. “I don’t like it when it stings,′ he said. ‘Nobody does.”

— J.D. Salinger

379. “The next part I don’t remember so hot. All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open. Only, I missed. I didn’t connect.”

— J.D. Salinger

380. “The funny part is, I felt like marrying her the minute I saw her. I’m crazy. I didn’t even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to God I’m crazy. I admit it.”

— J.D. Salinger

381. “It’s nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father’s farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.”

— J.D. Salinger

382. “If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.”

— J.D. Salinger

383. “If I were God, I certainly wouldn’t want people to love me sentimentally. It’s too unreliable.”

— J.D. Salinger

384. “Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day to learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.”

— J.D. Salinger

385. “God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.”

— J.D. Salinger

386. “Certain things they should stay the way they are.”

— J.D. Salinger

387. “If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn’t have to be a poem, for heaven’s sake.”

— J.D. Salinger

388. “That’s one nice thing about carrousels, they always play the same songs.”

— J.D. Salinger

389. “As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts.”

— J.D. Salinger

390. “Boy, did he depress me! I don’t mean he was a bad guy- he wasn’t. But you don’t have to be a bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it. All you have to do to depress somebody is give them a lot of phony advice while you’re looking for your initials in some can door- that’s all you have to do. I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been all out of breath.”

— J.D. Salinger

391. “I’ve missed you.” The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn’t mean them at all.”

— J.D. Salinger

392. “La vida es una partida y hay que vivirla de acuerdo con las reglas del juego.”

— J.D. Salinger

393. “The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs – if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t. You think if they’re intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don’t give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do.”

— J.D. Salinger

394. “If sentiment doesn’t ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.”

— J.D. Salinger

395. “Those war movies always do that to me. I don’t think I could stand it if I had to go to war. I really couldn’t. It wouldn’t be too bad if they’d just take you out and shoot you or something, but you have to stay in the Army so goddam long.”

— J.D. Salinger

396. “They make everything they touch turn absolutely academic and useless. To my mind, They’re mostly to blame for the mob of ignorant oafs with diplomas that are turned loose on the country every June.”

— J.D. Salinger

397. “This is of unspeakable importance. Please send any books on the structure of the human heart that I have not read.”

— J.D. Salinger

398. “I watched Kenneth’s face like a writer.”

— J.D. Salinger

399. “He finished combing his goddamn gorgeous hair.”

— J.D. Salinger

400. “You fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”

— J.D. Salinger