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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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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
Might
Collapse
Well
Breaking
Mean
Busy
Stay
Use
Energy
Able
Wells
Incidentally

More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
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She really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over - anywhere - her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows, and all, her ears - her whole face except her mouth and all.
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You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
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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.
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I'd swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.
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Girls. You never know what they're going to think.
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Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)
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My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
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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.
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If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.
J. D. Salinger
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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. Salinger
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You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
J. D. Salinger
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Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.
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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Happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.
J. D. Salinger
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probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. how well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. she was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that
J. D. Salinger
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In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.
J. D. Salinger
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
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I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.
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