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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.

— J. D. Salinger Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

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More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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

A Girl I Knew (1948)

The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

Franny and Zooey (1961)

How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose?

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

Teddy (1953)

Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.

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

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Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

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When the mind is not dissipated upon extraneous things, nor diffused over the world about us through the senses, it withdraws within itself, and of its own accord ascends to the contemplation of God.

Basil of Caesarea

Once you accept the existence of God — however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him — then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.

Morris West The Clowns of God (1981)

God seeks comrades and claims love,
the Devil seeks slaves and claims obedience.

Rabindranath Tagore Fireflies (1928)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: J. D. Salinger (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.