“On top of everything else," he said immediately, "we've got 'Wise Child' complexes. We've never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound. At least I do… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all… I'm standing on the edge of… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it. I can't always pray when I feel like… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was… The only thing that would be different would… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“And you make people nervous, young man," she said - most equably, for her. "You either take to somebody or you don't. If you… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas.” — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“He stuck around till around dinnertime, talking about all the guys at Pencey that he hated their guts, and squeezing this big pimple on… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn’t have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We’d… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.” — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“In certain Zen monasteries, it's a cardinal rule, if not the only serious enforced discipline, that when one monk calls out 'Hi!' to another… — j.d. salinger Copy Share Image
