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It’s history. It’s poetry.

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
Poetry
History

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it.
J. D. Salinger
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It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.
J. D. Salinger
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Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.
J. D. Salinger
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I'd never yell, Good luck! at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it.
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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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.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.
J. D. Salinger
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I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.
J. D. Salinger
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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.
J. D. Salinger
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Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?
J. D. Salinger
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She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.
J. D. Salinger
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That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.
J. D. Salinger
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You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems, . . . And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled , what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and--well, we iron things out together, that's all.
J. D. Salinger
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I kept picturing all these little kids in this big field of rye... If they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.
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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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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I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.
J. D. Salinger