Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “I didn’t care what kind of a job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

404. “Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it,” I said. “But it isn’t just that. It’s everything. I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always –.”

— J.D. Salinger

405. “Then I thought about the whole bunch of them sticking me in a goddam cemetery and all, with my name on this tombstone and all. Surrounded by dead guys. Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in a river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

407. “When I got out in front of Ernie’s and paid the fare, old Horwitz brought up the fish again. He certainly had it on his mind. “Listen,” he said. “If you was a fish, Mother Nature’d take care of you, wouldn’t she? Right? You don’t think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?” “No, but – ” “You’re goddam right they don’t,” Horwitz said, and drove off like a bat out of hell. He was about the touchiest guy I ever met. Everything you said made him sore.”

— J.D. Salinger

408. “I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”

— J.D. Salinger

409. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

413. “I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them.”

— J.D. Salinger

414. “Look, sir. Don’t worry about me,′ I said. ‘I mean it. I’ll be all right. I’m just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don’t they?”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

417. “It would be quite a relief to rid my system of fustian this year.”

— J.D. Salinger

418. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

420. “That killed me.”

— J.D. Salinger

421. “And you make people nervous, young man,” she said – most equably, for her. “You either take to somebody or you don’t. If you do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don’t like somebody – which is most of the time – then you just sit around like death itself and let the person talk themself into a hole. I’ve seen you do it.”

— J.D. Salinger

422. “You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart.”

— J.D. Salinger

423. “In a cruel manner of speaking, this young woman may well have lost her head before she was born; it is certainly not on her shoulders at this stage of the game.”

— J.D. Salinger

424. “It was just terrible! And the worst part was, I knew what a bore I was being, I knew how I was depressing people, or even hurting their feelings- but I just couldn’t stop! I just could not stop picking!”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

426. “For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world – not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things – work out rather beautifully.”

— J.D. Salinger

427. “Just get sick sometime and go visit yourself, and you’ll find out how tactless you are!”

— J.D. Salinger

428. “It may very well be that I hate like hell to play Martha to somebody else’s Mary.”

— J.D. Salinger

429. “He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.”

— J.D. Salinger

430. “It ends up with everybody at this long dinner table laughing their asses off because the great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies. Everybody thought it was a male, I suppose, or some goddam thing. All I can say is, don’t see it if you don’t want to puke all over yourself.”

— J.D. Salinger

431. “I didn’t want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.”

— J.D. Salinger

432. “High, I think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw the last shot he made. Yes. Oui.”

— J.D. Salinger

433. “What I liked about her, she didn’t give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.”

— J.D. Salinger

434. “La gente non fa caso mai a niente.”

— J.D. Salinger

435. “My opinions are all too frequently too damn harsh for words.”

— J.D. Salinger

436. “I’m a condition, not a man.”

— J.D. Salinger

437. “She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst.”

— J.D. Salinger

438. “I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window any more when you’re married.”

— J.D. Salinger

439. “I know that sounds mean to say, but I don’t mean it mean.”

— J.D. Salinger

440. “Then she introduced me to the Navy guy. His name was Commander Blop or something. 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.”

— J.D. Salinger

441. “I never bore people I haven’t known for at least a thousand years.”

— J.D. Salinger

442. “There were half circles under her eyes and other, subtler signs that mark an acutely troubled young girl, but nonetheless no one could have missed seeing that she was first-class beauty.”

— J.D. Salinger

443. “I think I’d first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate. I’d try to show them how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that... I guess, even before that, I’d get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever told them.”

— J.D. Salinger

444. “It’s just that if I’d had any guts at all, I wouldn’t have gone back to college at all this year. I don’t know. I mean it’s all the most incredible farce.”

— J.D. Salinger

445. “I spent a little more than five months in Vienna. I danced. I went ice skating and skiing. For strenuous exercise, I argued with an Englishman.”

— J.D. Salinger

446. “I’m just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want – some bastard with wavy hair?”

— J.D. Salinger

447. “Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

448. “Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong.”

— J.D. Salinger

449. “People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.”

— J.D. Salinger

450. “But her arms were probably the best of her. They were brown and round and good.”

— J.D. Salinger