Quotes by J.D. Salinger

“I've never seen such a bunch of apple-eaters.”

“I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though..."What the hellya reading?""Goddamn book."He shoved my...”

“I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if the...”

“This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.”

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing.”

“That's depressing, when somebody says "please" to you.”

“But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most.”

“I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?”

“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.”

“People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice...”

“Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn't smell like anyplace else. I don't know what the hell it is. It isn't cauliflower and it isn't perfumeI don't know what the hell it isbut you always know you...”

“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 consciousn...”

“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of trying to make me happy”

“Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy.”

“I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth.”

“A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about all.”

“I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school.”

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

“That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace.”