J. D. Salinger Quotes - Page 4

I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

There are still a few men who love desperately.

Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

Why's it so sunny?" she repeated. Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.

I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

I just hope that one day - preferably when we’re both blind drunk - we can talk about it.

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not.

I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?

Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies

It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

Where do the ducks go in the winter?

Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.

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

People never notice anything.