01c. 1964 ADWe're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I. I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-one-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible. I swear to you, I could murder them both without batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The great emancipators. My God. I can't even sit down to lunch with a man any more and hold up my end of a decent conversation. I either get so bored or so goddamn preachy that if the son of a bitch had any sense, he'd break his chair over my headJ.D. Salinger / quote ↗
02c. 1964 ADPeople with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,...,and he had very red hair.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
03c. 1964 ADI'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
06c. 1964 ADI've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though..."What the hellya reading?""Goddamn book."He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name on it. "Any good?" he said."This sentence I'm reading is terrific.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
07c. 1964 ADI'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with — which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And — most important—nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
08c. 1964 ADDon't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
09c. 1964 ADOur foyer has a funny smell that doesn't smell like anyplace else. I don't know what the hell it is. It isn't cauliflower and it isn't perfume—I don't know what the hell it is—but you always know you're home.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
10c. 1964 ADI am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of trying to make me happyJ.D. Salinger / quote ↗
11c. 1964 ADOh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
12c. 1964 ADI felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
13c. 1964 ADA story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about all.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
14c. 1964 ADI am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I’ll watch for that book.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
15c. 1964 ADAs much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
16c. 1964 ADIf German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
17c. 1964 ADShe threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss—spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the follow-through, and with somewhat of a forehead-bumping aspect.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
18c. 1964 ADThis is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
19c. 1964 ADThese intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they're running the whole thing.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
21c. 1964 ADBut what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
23c. 1964 ADThe 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.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
24c. 1964 ADPeople always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything.J.D. Salinger / quote ↗
