J.D. Salinger Quotes

All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you.

A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.

Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

I have a feeling that you're riding for some terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started...