Top 400 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

406. “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

407. “I’m a condition, not a man.”

— J.D. Salinger

408. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

410. “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

411. “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

412. “You beautiful little moron.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

423. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

426. “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

427. “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

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. “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

430. “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

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. “Who the Hell is Lane?” he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admiti that he know the first names of certain people.”

— J.D. Salinger