I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met.
What I liked about her, she didn't give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.
It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday.
Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
Someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from yo. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement, and it isn't education. It is history. It's poetry.
New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed.
Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
Certain things they should stay the way they are.
They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.
Call up and say you were killed. Let go of that damn glass.
I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though.
If you're supposed to sock somebody in the jaw, and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it. I'm just no good at it, though. I'd rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw.
Old Luce. He was strictly a pain in the ass, but he certainly had a good vocabulary. He had the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton when I was there. They gave us a test.
The connection was so bad, and I couldn't talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?
The hole in the shoulder of his T shirt was not a cute hole. The excess material in the seat of his seersucker shorts, the excess length of the shorts themselves, were not cute excesses.
There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.
Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything.
I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't.
As a matter of fact, I'm the only dumb one in the family.
And for some reason he had an unfolded white handkerchief draped over his head, possibly to ward off rain, or hail, or brimstone.
I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.
I got up and went over and looked out the window. I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.
But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a goddam bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held my breath, for God's sake. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard.
I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.
There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.
Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.
I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing.
I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.
Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic.
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.
The thing is, it drives me crazy if somebody else gets killed—especially somebody very smart and entertaining and all—and it's somebody else's fault.
Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know.
You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.
People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily,...,and he had very red hair.
If a body catch a body coming through the rye.
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.
I mean he was mostly a Year Book kind of handsome guy.
Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.
I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I'm not sophisticated. I'm not anything. I'm just me.
I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting.
Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books.
Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.
I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.
She looked nice, smoking. She inhaled and all,m but she didn't wolf the smoke down, the way most women around her age do. She had a lot of charm. She had quite a lot of sex appeal, too, if you really want to know.
You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.
The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody'd say something smarter than he had.
