Quote

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.

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
Stop
Like
Nicer
People
Alive
Liking
Though
Sake
Times
Especially
Stills
Thousand
Still
Dead
Think
Somebody
Thinking

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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People are always ruining things for you.
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Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)
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.
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I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.
J. D. Salinger
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Who in the Bible besides 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?
J. D. Salinger
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The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?
J. D. Salinger
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. Salinger
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I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.
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It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
J. D. Salinger
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She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
J. D. Salinger
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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?
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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John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
J. D. Salinger
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If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.
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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You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
J. D. Salinger
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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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What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J. D. Salinger
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I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.
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