J. D. Salinger Quotes - Page 10

You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time You turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze In this goddam phenomenal world.

Life is a gift horse in my opinion.

Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.

It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.

But you can't always tell - with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.

People never believe you.

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!

It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. I think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves. One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something - it used to drive mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something they've lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much. Maybe that's why I'm partly yellow. It's no excuse, though. It really isn't. What you should be is not yellow at all.

I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.

But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.

It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.

You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.

Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.'

Take most people, they are crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, they are always talking about have many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that is even newer. I do not even like old cars. . . . I'd rather have a horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors. It's hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I mean they were good, but they were too good.

There isn’t a nightclub in the world that you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you’re with some girl that really knocks you out.

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.

If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.

Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.