Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.”

— J.D. Salinger

402. “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

403. “Ve, isin kotu tarafi da, bohem takildiginda ya da bunun gibi bir cilginlik yaptiginda, sen de herkes kadar duzene ayak uydurmus oluyorsun, sadece bicim farki var.”

— J.D. Salinger

404. “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

405. “A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that’s about all.”

— J.D. Salinger

406. “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

407. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

409. “I’m way off. I’ll just ruin the whole weekend. Maybe there’s a trapdoor under my chair, and I’ll just disappear.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “I’m a condition, not a man.”

— J.D. Salinger

421. “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

422. “I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody. I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”

— J.D. Salinger

423. “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

424. “You beautiful little moron.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

426. “There is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful.”

— J.D. Salinger

427. “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

428. “They sang without instrumental accompaniment – or, more accurately in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation. A couple of the very youngest children dragged the tempo a trifle, but in a way that only the composer’s mother could have found fault with.”

— J.D. Salinger

429. “That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places.”

— J.D. Salinger

430. “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

431. “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

432. “I don’t suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn’t a hell of a lot he can do about it.”

— J.D. Salinger

433. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

435. “The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?”

— J.D. Salinger

436. “Presently, some sort of fish was served to me on a plate with a small but noticeable trace of coagulated catsup along the border. Mme. Yoshoto asked me, in English – and her accent was unexpectedly charming – if I would prefer an egg, but I said, “Non, non, madame – merci!” I said I never ate eggs. M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper against my water glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate and I systematically swallowed in silence.”

— J.D. Salinger

437. “We are required only to keep looking.”

— J.D. Salinger

438. “You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior... many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.”

— J.D. Salinger

439. “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

440. “That’s what makes me so mad! I could just spit! It’s like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something...”

— J.D. Salinger

441. “I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.”

— J.D. Salinger

442. “Though we’ve talked and talked and talked, we’ve all agreed not to say a word.”

— J.D. Salinger

443. “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

444. “Teddy looked at him directly for the first time. “Are you a poet?” he asked. “A poet?” Nicholson said. “Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?” “I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”

— J.D. Salinger

445. “He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

447. “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

448. “I went over to my window and opened it and packed a snowball with my bare hands. The snow was very good for packing. I didn’t throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed my mind. The car looked so nice and white. Then I started to throw it at a hydrant, but that looked too nice and white, too. Finally I didn’t throw it at anything.”

— J.D. Salinger

449. “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

450. “So what I did was, I went over and bought two orchestra seats for I Know My Love. It was a benefit performance or something. I didn’t much want to see it, but I knew old Sally, the queen of phonies, would start drooling all over the place when I told her I had tickets for that, because the Lunts were in it and all. She liked shows that are supposed to be very sophisticated and dry and all, with the Lunts and all.”

— J.D. Salinger