J.D. Salinger quote: "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."

I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a...
J.D. SALINGER

I've never seen such a bunch of apple-eaters.
J.D. SALINGER

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that ...
J.D. SALINGER

This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling ...
J.D. SALINGER

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to b...
J.D. SALINGER

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. T...
J.D. SALINGER

You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
J.D. SALINGER

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
J.D. SALINGER

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?
J.D. SALINGER

That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look ...
J.D. SALINGER

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
J.D. SALINGER

He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to ...
J.D. SALINGER

I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay a...
J.D. SALINGER

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
J.D. SALINGER

I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really ...
J.D. SALINGER

when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.
J.D. SALINGER

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature...
J.D. SALINGER

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightene...
J.D. SALINGER

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

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
J.D. SALINGER

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even kn...
J.D. SALINGER

I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.
J.D. SALINGER

Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
J.D. SALINGER

who wants flowers when youre dead? nobody.
J.D. SALINGER

But I'm Crazy. I swear to God I am.
J.D. SALINGER

I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this.
J.D. SALINGER

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

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.
J.D. SALINGER

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enoug...
J.D. SALINGER

Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.
J.D. SALINGER

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And...
J.D. SALINGER

I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
J.D. SALINGER

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of thos...
J.D. SALINGER

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants ...
J.D. SALINGER

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy...
J.D. SALINGER

I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless t...
J.D. SALINGER

She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies ...
J.D. SALINGER

I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to ha...
J.D. SALINGER

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, hol...
J.D. SALINGER

You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time
You turn ar...
J.D. SALINGER

Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever...
J.D. SALINGER

Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?'
Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to...
J.D. SALINGER

Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm no...
J.D. SALINGER

My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minu...
J.D. SALINGER

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.
J.D. SALINGER

People never notice anything.
J.D. SALINGER

It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. I think maybe I'm just partly yell...
J.D. SALINGER

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
J.D. SALINGER

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't ...
J.D. SALINGER

It’s history. It’s poetry.
J.D. SALINGER

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

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

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

I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though.
J.D. SALINGER

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.
J.D. SALINGER

Mothers are all slightly insane.
J.D. SALINGER

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone e...
J.D. SALINGER

I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something.
J.D. SALINGER

It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in lo...
J.D. SALINGER

I also say "Boy" a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite youn...
J.D. SALINGER

Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and ev...
J.D. SALINGER

People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,...,and he had very red hair.
J.D. SALINGER

Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost i...
J.D. SALINGER

Then I’d throw my automatic down the elevator shaft-after I’d wiped off all the fingerprints and...
J.D. SALINGER

D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn't know w...
J.D. SALINGER

That’s what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere...
J.D. SALINGER

I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.
J.D. SALINGER

I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometime...
J.D. SALINGER

I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. An...
J.D. SALINGER

As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his pri...
J.D. SALINGER

Rudford lay on his back in the grass and watched great cotton clouds slip through the sky. Peculiarl...
J.D. SALINGER

چیزی که دنبالش می‌گشتم یه جور احساس خدافظی بود. می‌خوا...
J.D. SALINGER

Think about this truck. Make believe this is not the darkest, wettest, most miserable Army truck you...
J.D. SALINGER

I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you Vince?"
"Not a...
J.D. SALINGER

Unfortunately, here as elsewhere on this touching planet, imitation is the watchword and prestige th...
J.D. SALINGER

After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange...
J.D. SALINGER

I hate saying corny things like 'traveling incognito.' But when I' with somebody that's corny, I alw...
J.D. SALINGER

I hate saying corny things like "traveling incognito." But when I'm with somebody that's corny, I al...
J.D. SALINGER

If or when I do start going to an analyst, I hope to God he has the foresight to let a dermatologist...
J.D. SALINGER

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world...
J.D. SALINGER

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate obser...
J.D. SALINGER

Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your...
J.D. SALINGER

I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-bloo...
J.D. SALINGER

Give me an honest con man any day.
J.D. SALINGER

You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.
J.D. SALINGER

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 ha...
J.D. SALINGER

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.
J.D. SALINGER

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
J.D. SALINGER

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.
J.D. SALINGER

I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
J.D. SALINGER

Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, som...
J.D. SALINGER

I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a whil...
J.D. SALINGER

And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or s...
J.D. SALINGER

This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.
J.D. SALINGER

The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody'd say something smarter than he had.
J.D. SALINGER

He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I just se...
J.D. SALINGER

Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me i...
J.D. SALINGER

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
J.D. SALINGER

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door."<...
J.D. SALINGER

Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic.
J.D. SALINGER

When I'd originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I'd had a passing impulse to pick...
J.D. SALINGER

I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it. I can't always pray when ...
J.D. SALINGER

But you don't have to be a bad guy to depress somebody-you can be a good guy and do it.
J.D. SALINGER

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave ...
J.D. SALINGER

These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're runn...
J.D. SALINGER

If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the w...
J.D. SALINGER

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt l...
J.D. SALINGER

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.
J.D. SALINGER

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'...
J.D. SALINGER

People always clap for the wrong reasons.
J.D. SALINGER

People are always ruining things for you.
J.D. SALINGER

When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to ...
J.D. SALINGER

I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.
J.D. SALINGER

is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield
J.D. SALINGER

When I really worry about something, I don´t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom wh...
J.D. SALINGER

The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than th...
J.D. SALINGER

That digression business got on my nerves. I don't now. The trouble with me is, I like it whe...
J.D. SALINGER

It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns...
J.D. SALINGER

the sentence im reading is terrific ...
J.D. SALINGER

I don’t even like old cars. I mean, they don’t even interest me at all. I'd rather have a goddam...
J.D. SALINGER

You never even worried with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were ha...
J.D. SALINGER

Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls wi...
J.D. SALINGER

What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I proba...
J.D. SALINGER

That's something that annoys the hell out of me- I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and ...
J.D. SALINGER

I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.
J.D. SALINGER

Lawyers are alright, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me", I said. "I mean they're alright if th...
J.D. SALINGER

We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I. I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-one-y...
J.D. SALINGER

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars. I ...
J.D. SALINGER

I took her dress over to the closet and hung it up. It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I...
J.D. SALINGER

I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn ne...
J.D. SALINGER

You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there.
J.D. SALINGER

There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks...
J.D. SALINGER

I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could te...
J.D. SALINGER

Well. He's a very sensitive boy. He's really never been a terribly good mixer with other boys...' J.D. SALINGER

I guess, even before that, I'd get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever tol...
J.D. SALINGER

Do you have any emotions?"
"If I do, I don't remember when I ever used them. I don't see what t...
J.D. SALINGER

He was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream--...
J.D. SALINGER

Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.
J.D. SALINGER

Mary Jane. Listen. Please," Eloise said, sobbing. "You remember our freshman year, and I had that br...
J.D. SALINGER

Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody.
J.D. SALINGER

Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no...
J.D. SALINGER

My father wrote beautifully,” Esmé interrupted. “I’m saving a number of his letters for poste...
J.D. SALINGER

Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire.
J.D. SALINGER

You're just being logical...You're just giving me a regular, intelligent answer. I was trying to hel...
J.D. SALINGER

I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when car was in motion.
"I beg your pardon?" ...
J.D. SALINGER

You know Sven? The man who takes care of the gym?' he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nichol...
J.D. SALINGER

But doctors talk about cells as if they had such unlimited importance all by themselves. As if they ...
J.D. SALINGER

That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dres...
J.D. SALINGER

I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak ...
J.D. SALINGER

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the...
J.D. SALINGER

Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.
J.D. SALINGER

Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey...
J.D. SALINGER

Did you see more glass?
J.D. SALINGER

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all ...
J.D. SALINGER

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable...
J.D. SALINGER

You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?' he asked. 'You know w...
J.D. SALINGER

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ...
J.D. SALINGER

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhapp...
J.D. SALINGER

They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It'...
J.D. SALINGER

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

Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words "Dear God, lif...
J.D. SALINGER

You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logi...
J.D. SALINGER

If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable...
J.D. SALINGER

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things ...
J.D. SALINGER

We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with ...
J.D. SALINGER

Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them-especially if they were about a thousa...
J.D. SALINGER

If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.
J.D. SALINGER

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

Every time you mention some guy that's strictly a bastard— very mean, or very conceited and all—...
J.D. SALINGER

I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do l...
J.D. SALINGER

If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate ev...
J.D. SALINGER

It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.
J.D. SALINGER

Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm goin...
J.D. SALINGER

I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park Sout...
J.D. SALINGER

I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.
J.D. SALINGER

It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
J.D. SALINGER

Sleep tight, ya morons!
J.D. SALINGER

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.
J.D. SALINGER

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was bor...
J.D. SALINGER

Everybody in this family gets his goddamn religion in a different package.
J.D. SALINGER

Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. - Holden Caulfield
J.D. SALINGER

She was around ten minutes late, as a matter of fact. I didn't give a damn, though. All that crap th...
J.D. SALINGER

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say...
J.D. SALINGER

You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have t...
J.D. SALINGER

But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking abo...
J.D. SALINGER

Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried to grap for the...
J.D. SALINGER

Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
J.D. SALINGER

We got passes, till midnight after the parade. I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, tw...
J.D. SALINGER

-Hey, listen," I said. "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That litt...
J.D. SALINGER

If you're not in
the mood, you can't do that stuff right.
J.D. SALINGER

I can be quite sarcastic when I'm in the mood.
J.D. SALINGER

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just ...
J.D. SALINGER

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of trying to make me happy
J.D. SALINGER

O tipo da marinha e eu dissemos um ao outro que tinha sido um prazer. Que é uma coisa que me deixa ...
J.D. SALINGER

People always think something's all true.
J.D. SALINGER

It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you...
J.D. SALINGER

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly
J.D. SALINGER

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Budd...
J.D. SALINGER

I don't like it when it stings,' he said. 'Nobody does.
J.D. SALINGER

American people simply will not countenance being lied to by their own President.
PIERRE SALINGER

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.

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J.D. Salinger

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.

J.D. Salinger

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