Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

404. “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

405. “They’re not. That’s partly what’s so awful. I mean they’re not real poets. They’re just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they’re not poets.”

— J.D. Salinger

406. “Oh, it’s lovely to see you!? Franny said as the cab moved off. ‘I’ve missed you.’ The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn’t mean them at all.”

— J.D. Salinger

407. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.”

— J.D. Salinger

413. “That killed me.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

415. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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. “I’m a condition, not a man.”

— J.D. Salinger

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.”

— J.D. Salinger

439. “You beautiful little moron.”

— J.D. Salinger

440. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

442. “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

443. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

447. “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

448. “Sir, we ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and pictures in the temple.’ Rama Krishna: ‘That’s the way with you Calcutta people. You want to teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves. Do you think God does not know that He is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?”

— J.D. Salinger

449. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger