24+ J.D. Salinger Quotes And Sayings

Following is our list of the best J.D. Salinger quotes and sayings.

Top 10 J.D. Salinger Quotes

1. The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
2. Mothers are all slightly insane.
3. Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.
4. I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
5. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.
6. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.
7. People are always ruining things for you.
8. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
9. I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
10. 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.

J.D. Salinger Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — 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 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. — J.D. Salinger

I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean. — J.D. Salinger

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And 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 do all day. 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 like to be. — J.D. Salinger

I drew laughing, high-breasted girls aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens. — J.D. Salinger

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

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal. — J.D. Salinger

But doctors talk about cells as if they had such unlimited importance all by themselves. As if they didn't really belong to the person that has them. Teddy brushed back his hair from his forehead with one hand. I grew my own body, he said. Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously, at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because—obviously—I've used it. — J.D. Salinger

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road. — J.D. Salinger

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. — 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 born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. — J.D. Salinger

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart. — J.D. Salinger

Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God. — J.D. Salinger