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J. D. Salinger

113 quotesNovelist · Born Jan 1, 1919 · Died Jan 27, 2010 · United States Of America · Male

Jerome David "J.D." Salinger (/ˈsælᵻndʒər/; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer who is known for his widely-read novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Following his early success publishing short stories and Catcher in the Rye, Salinger led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980. Salinger was raised in Manhattan and began writing short stories while in secondary school. Several were published in Story magazine in the early 1940s before he began serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his later work. In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year. The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequentl

All Love (10)Life (5)Girls (3)romance (2)Scars (2)Missing Someone (2)pretending (2)Excitement (2)mature (2)Passion (2)realization (2)People (2)Openness (2)Experience (2)Appreciation (2)

From “Franny and Zooey”

I just hope that one day—preferably when we're both blind drunk—we can talk about it.

Lovers Memories Past Memories Love secretly loving

...and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

Grief delight happiness and unhappiness Experience Life

God damn it, there are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.

Appreciation Life is Meaningful

Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them…

I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want — some bastard with wavy hair?

I can't see why anybody — unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim — would even want to say a prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all!…

I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you…

I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you…

The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.

When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer — you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important…

For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

You still can't love a Jesus as much as you'd like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done — and you know it. You're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you're constitutionally unable to love or…

You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right — God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business,…

The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for…

Jesus knew — knew — that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.

I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.

"You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation from all hankerings.' It's this…

Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as…

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