J. D. Salinger Quotes

If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.

"You know Adam?" Teddy asked him.<br \>"Do I know who?"<br \>"Adam. In the Bible."<br \>Nicholson smiled. "Not personally," he said dryly.<br \>

She really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over - anywhere - her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows, and all, her ears - her whole face except her mouth and all.

I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three.

Do it for the fat lady!

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

Did you know, God damn it, that Les was all for bringing a tangerine in to you last night before he went to bed? My God. Even Bessie can't stand stories with tangerines in them. And God knows I can't. If you're going to go on with this breakdown business, I wish to hell you'd go back to college to have it. Where you're not the baby of the family. And where, God knows, nobody'll have any urges to bring you any tangerines. And where you don't keep your goddam tap shoes in the closet.

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

If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that — and you do — and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.

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 had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible."

یه چیزی که خیلی روم تاثیر گذاشت این خانومه بود که بغلم نشسته بود و همه ش گریه می کرد.هر چی فیلمه مزخرف تر می شد بیشتر گریه می کرد.
آدم فکر می کرد چون آدم مهربونیه داره گریه می کنه ولی از این خبرا نبود. من بغلش نشسته بودم و خوب می دونم.یه بچه همراش بود که طفلک خیلی خسته شده بود و می خواست بره دستشویی ولی خانومه هی بهش می گفت آروم بگیره و مواظب رفتارش باشه.اندازه ی یک گرگ مهربون بود.بعضی ها این طوری ان. واسه یه فیلمِ چرت و پرت اشک می ریزن ولی تو بیش ترِ موارد حرومزاده های پستی ان!

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 light bulbs.

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.

It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.