“You're a little girl but nobody stays a little girl or a little boy for long. It's a quick business being a kid.” — J.D. Salinger Copy Share Image
“Mattie,” he said silently to no one in the room, “you’re a little girl. But nobody stays a little girl or a little boy long—take me, for instance. All of a sudden little girls wear lipstick, all of a sudden… — 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 some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share
“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 it. In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share
“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. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do,… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share
“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 do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don't like somebody - which is most of the time - then you just sit around like death… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share
“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 than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if… — J.D. Salinger Copy Share
“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
