J. D. Salinger Quotes - Page 8

The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be.

I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about.

How old are you? I asked her. "Old enough to know better." she said.

I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.

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. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.

You don't always have to get too sexy to get to know a girl.

But don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God.

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. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.

People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it.

I'd never yell, "Good luck!" at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first one who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.

The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding

who wants flowers when youre dead? nobody.

How do you know you're going to do something, untill you do it?

But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.

My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.

Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away.

She's quite intelligent, in my stupidity.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

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.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.