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J. D. Salinger

62 quotes

“She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Girl I Knew (1948)
“I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Twentieth Century (1972) by Caroline Farrar Ware, p. 429
“I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in The Baton Rouge Advocate (1980), as quoted in "J.D. Salinger, author of 'Catcher in the Rye,' dies" in The Washington Post (28 January 2010)
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. ... It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. ... I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. ... I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statements to New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh, as quoted in Salinger : A Biography (2000) by Paul Alexander; also in If You Really Want to Hear About It : Writers on J.D. Salinger and His Work (2006) by Catherine…
“There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the main character in his novel The Catcher in the Rye, as quoted in Asks Appeals Court to Uphold Ban on ‘Catcher’ Sequel" in The New York Times (14 August 2009)
“I never saw so many tigers.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing — perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody's a nun.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is a gift horse in my opinion.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You love God, don't you?" Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. "Isn't that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock —" "Yes, sure, I love Him. But I don't love Him sentimentally. He never said anybody had to love Him sentimentally," Teddy said. "If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know Adam?" Teddy asked him."Do I know who?""Adam. In the Bible."Nicholson smiled. "Not personally," he said dryly.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You still can't love a Jesus as much as you'd like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done — and you know it. You're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being — even a Professor Tupper — is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer — you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master — some guru, some holy man — to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right — God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant — if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back "What?”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a kind of a paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected — never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hallmark, then, of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananda's terms; i.e, "See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk") — the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person — the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist — who can write a poem that is a poem.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father's Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes—fools, no.”
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source