Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.
After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.
There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked.
Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.'
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
That's something that annoys the hell out of me-I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't.
It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.
The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to.
There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.
If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will.
Why's it so sunny?" she repeated. Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.
It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.
It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.
You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.
They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way.
It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.
It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.
My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.
She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).
I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.
Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?
She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.
I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I'm crazy. I swear to God I am.
If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.
Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first one who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.
I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.
You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.
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.
If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.
She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.
Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.
I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.
You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.
Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?' Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.