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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.

J. D. Salinger

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J. D. Salinger
Age: 91 †
Born: 1919
Born: January 1
Died: 2010
Died: January 27
Author
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Jerome David Salinger
Jerome Salinger
Didn
Peck
Announcers
Dummy
Ill
Radio
Degrees
Knew
Pedagogical
Read
Dummies

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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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.
J. D. Salinger
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In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.
J. D. Salinger
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I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher In the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.
J. D. Salinger
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I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.
J. D. Salinger
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... even the most sublimely accomplished non-stop talker can't consistently please.
J. D. Salinger
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People are always ruining things for you.
J. D. Salinger
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I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
J. D. Salinger
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Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.
J. D. Salinger
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Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
J. D. Salinger
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Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.
J. D. Salinger
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But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.
J. D. Salinger
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Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies
J. D. Salinger
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If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.
J. D. Salinger
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I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.
J. D. Salinger
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Oh, this happiness is strong stuff.
J. D. Salinger
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Listen, he said. If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya? No, but-- You're goddam right they don't
J. D. Salinger
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For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
J. D. Salinger
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Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
J. D. Salinger
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I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.
J. D. Salinger
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Give me an honest con man any day.
J. D. Salinger