“If you're not inthe mood, you can't do that stuff right.”

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

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

“I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

“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.”

“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 buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the ope...”

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished...”

“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”

“But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written 'fuck you' on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would s...”

“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 buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the ope...”

“is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield”

“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.”

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”