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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
Well
Breaking
Mean
Busy
Stay
Use
Energy
Able
Wells
Incidentally
Might
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More quotes by J. D. Salinger

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Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.
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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But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.
J. D. Salinger
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There are still a few men who love desperately.
J. D. Salinger
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I know. I'm very hard to talk to. I realize that.
J. D. Salinger
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Give me an honest con man any day.
J. D. Salinger
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We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
J. D. Salinger
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I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.
J. D. Salinger
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The sentence im reading is terrific.
J. D. Salinger
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I think that one of these days, he said, you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you.
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'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.
J. D. Salinger
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I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. Sometimes, I act a lot older than I am--I really do. But people never notice it. People never notice anything.
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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I am always saying Glad to've met you to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
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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One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.
J. D. Salinger
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After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.
J. D. Salinger
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I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about.
J. D. Salinger
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Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.
J. D. Salinger