Top 500 J.D. Salinger Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Almost every damn school in the world gets out earlier for Christmas break than the school I go to.”

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

412. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

420. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

422. “That killed me.”

— J.D. Salinger

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

430. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

434. “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

435. “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

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

— 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. “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

439. “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

440. “I’m a condition, not a man.”

— J.D. Salinger

441. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

443. “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

444. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

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

— J.D. Salinger

447. “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

448. “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

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

— J.D. Salinger

450. “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