“Without keeping up a merciless guard, day and night, the variety of forward opinions in this world could easily destroy one’s sanity.” — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“Seymour once said to me — in a crosstown bus, of all places — that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.” — 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
