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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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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
Compete
Scare
Opposite
Opposites
Afraid
Scares

More quotes by 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
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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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Are all your stars shining?
J. D. Salinger
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She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.
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I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.
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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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We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
J. D. Salinger
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Some of my best friedns are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.
J. D. Salinger
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There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.
J. D. Salinger
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I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.
J. D. Salinger
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That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.
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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It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.
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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Zooey said... It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.
J. D. Salinger
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I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.
J. D. Salinger
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It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.
J. D. Salinger
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I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.
J. D. Salinger
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They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way.
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