J. D. Salinger Quotes

″‘Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.‘” ‘Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.’ Game, my ass. 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.”

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

“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’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

“I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”

“Then I started reading this timetable I had in my pocket. Just to stop lying. Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours.”

“Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that’s impossible, but it’s too bad anyway.”

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes....If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”

“It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”

“Lots of times you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking.”

“That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”

“The guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the disciples.”

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

“I’m just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don’t they?”

“I am always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice.”

“The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.”

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

“And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”

“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.”

“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 can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

“I think that one of these days...you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there. But immediately. You can’t afford to lose a minute. Not you.”

“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

“I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.”

“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.”

“I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me.”

“If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer. ”

“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.”

“Everything everybody does is so ... not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. ”

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I respect.”

“She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane’s hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. ”

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms. ”

“There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”

“I have no ... authority to be speaking up like a seer ... We’ve had enough seers in this family. ”

“It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.”

″ Franny literally jumped ... ‘What book?’ she said. ‘This, you mean?’

“That little book she carried all around the whole house ... is at the whole root of this whole business. ”

“And I can’t be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”

“He tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.”

“You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge.”

“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”

“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.”

“The aim ... is to wake everybody up to the need and benefits of saying the Jesus Prayer.”

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting”

“You can’t exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.”

“The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight.”

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

“I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago.”

“I knew it would take a certain amount of deep, constructive brooding on my father’s part to figure out a way of getting me into the firm in broad daylight - I happened to give both his partners the willies on sight.”

“Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.”

“Maybe I just worried too much about things.”

“We just never said anything to each other. Over a period of four months, we must have talked for thirty or thirty-five evenings without saying a word.”

“Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.”

“She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence.”

“I was taken a little aback, four or five evenings later, when my father suddenly asked me at dinner how I would like to go to Europe to learn a couple of languages the firm could use. First to Vienna and then maybe to Paris, he said unelaborately.”

“When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.”

“There was something fantastic and extremely heady about seeing her standing in the pedestrian lobby of the Schwedenkino, and I readily gave up my place in the box-office queue to go to speak to her. But as I charged across the lobby toward her over a number of innocent feet, I saw that she was neither alone nor with a girl friend or someone old enough to be her father.”

“I found out soon after we met that Leah’s father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. ”

“Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance.”

“At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. ”

“I was always half-eaten away by the respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.”

“When I looked at Leah again, her beauty seemed too great for the size of the room. The only way to make room for it was to speak of it.”

“A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”

“I’ll never forget this time he wanted to do a portrait of me. He always used to say to me - serious as the devil, too - ‘Eddie, you’re not beautiful according to conventional standards, but there’s something in your face I wanna catch.’ Serious as the devil he’d say it, I mean. Well. I only posed for him this once.”

“The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her.”