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J. D. Salinger Quotes

1919–2010 United States

Jerome David Salinger (1 January 1919 – 27 January 2010) was an American author, most famous for his novel The Catcher in the Rye.

United States
Novelists
Short story writers

Also known as: Salinger, Salinger, J. D.

Random J. D. Salinger quote

47 quotes

I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

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.

Nine Stories (1953)

What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can't believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It's a prissy word invented by the clergy.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

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 conscience.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

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

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

Nine Stories (1953)

You still can't love a Jesus as much as you'd like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done — and you know it.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Anyway, I'm sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want — some bastard with wavy hair?

Franny and Zooey (1961)

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

Nine Stories (1953)

He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

Interview in The Baton Rouge Advocate (1980)

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.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world — not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things — work out rather beautifully.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

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

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls — but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up?

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: J. D. Salinger (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.