J.D. Salinger

“Exactly what don't I think is beautiful? Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God. Anything.”

“If you're going to go to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl ㅡ because the enemy's there, and not because you don't like his hairdo or his goddamn necktie.”

“Where do the ducks go in the winter?”

“People always think something's all true.”

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

“That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.”

“Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake," he said. "That's a deer shooting hat.""Like hell it is." I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. "This is a people shooting hat," I said. "I shoot people in this hat.”

“We're the tattooed lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.”

“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.”

“I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it.' He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. 'As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”

“The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they'll say he's conceited. Even smart girls do it.”

“When she was done whispering in the mike and being cute as hell, they'd sing a song half in English and half in French and drive all the phonies in the place mad with joy.”

“You know Sven? The man who takes care of the gym?' he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. 'Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he'd have a very, very bad night's sleep, because he's very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He'd know it was only a dream.'Nicholson nodded. 'What's the point exactly?'The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only he wouldn't know it. I mean he wouldn't wake up till he died himself.”

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

“It's boring to do that every two minutes.”

“It’s history. It’s poetry.”

“She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.”

“Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.”

“Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”

“Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.”

“Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.”

“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all… I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye”

“Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.”

“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.”

“I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.”

“There is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful.”

“I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when car was in motion."I beg your pardon?" said the woman."I said I see you're looking at my feet"."I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor," said the woman, and faced the doors of the car."If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don't be a God-damned sneak about it.""Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back."I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the young man.”

“Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.”

“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.”

“You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.”

“Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer--that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it--to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“Do it for the fat lady!”

“oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It's marvelously liberating.”

“Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.Franny was among the first of the girls to get off the train, from a car at the far, northern end of the platform. Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth.”

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”

“I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.”

“Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.”

“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?”

“I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.”

“She's quite intelligent, in my stupidity.”

“You're just being logical...You're just giving me a regular, intelligent answer. I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.”

“His voice was oddly and beautifully rough-cut, as some small boys’ voices are. Each of his phrasings was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.”

“We’re all animals,’ he said. ‘Basically, we’re all animals.”

“I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.”

“The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?”

“In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. ”

“When I really worry about something, I don’t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don’t go. I’m too worried to go. I don’t want to interrupt my worrying to go. ”

“You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?' he asked. 'You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are....'The trouble is,' Teddy said, 'most people don't want to see things the way they are. They don't even want to stop getting born and dying all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it's really nice.' He reflected. 'I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,' he said. He shook his head.”

“If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.”

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