Salinger Love Quotes & Sayings

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly ... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it. — J.D. Salinger

Franny was among the first of the girls to get off the train, from a car at the far, northern end of the platform. Lane spotted her immediately, and despite whatever it was he was trying to do with his face, his arm that shot up into the air was the whole truth. Franny saw it, and him, and waved extravagantly back. She was wearing a sheared-raccoon coat, and Lane, walking to- ward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on the platform who really knew Franny's coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself. — J.D. Salinger

I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. — J.D. Salinger

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

Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation. — J.D. Salinger

You're a student - whether that idea appeals to you or not. You're in love with knowledge. — J.D. Salinger

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. — J.D. Salinger

The one that sang, old Janine, was always whispering into the g***** microphone before she sang. She'd say, 'And now we like to geeve you our impression of Vooly Voo Fransay. Eet ees the story of leetle Fransh girl who comes to a beeg ceety, just like New York, and falls een love wees a leetle boy from Brookleen. We hope you like eet.' Then, when she was all done whispering and being cute as hell, she'd sing some dopey song, half in English and half in French, and drive all the phonies in the place mad with joy. — J.D. Salinger

That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can. — J.D. Salinger

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book. — J.D. Salinger

I really began to love to read while in high school, and my favorite authors were my heroes: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut. — Louis Sachar

At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick's skull. I want an honorable goddam skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddam skull like Yorick's. — J.D. Salinger

She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth. — J.D. Salinger

This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me. — J.D. Salinger

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

Let's just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you. — J.D. Salinger

Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it. — J.D. Salinger

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. — J.D. Salinger

I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. — J.D. Salinger

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc. — J.D. Salinger

Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor. — J.D. Salinger

I love you I love you I love you. Do you actually know I've only danced with you twice in eleven months? — J.D. Salinger

There are still a few men who love desperately. — J.D. Salinger

When I'd checked into the bathroom with Seymour's diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour's handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo's. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror; 'Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block. — J.D. Salinger

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

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes. — J.D. Salinger

Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don't know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can't go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn't fit anything. — J.D. Salinger

I'm horrified to admit that I just love Salinger. I was devastated to find out that other people feel the same way. — Ethan Hawke

Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words, "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the statue of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder, 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." He started to write Dostoevski's name under the inscription, but saw - with fright that ran through his whole body - that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book. — J.D. Salinger

God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be. — J.D. Salinger

You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world. {...} I used to worry about that. I don't worry about it very much any more. At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick's skull. I want an honorable goddamn skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddamn skull like Yorick's. — J.D. Salinger

McVries seemed not to have heard.
"These things, they don't even bear the weight of conversation," he said, "J.D. Salinger ... John Knowles ... even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes ... they've destroyed being an adolescent, Garraty. If you're a sixteen-year-boy, you can't discuss the pains of adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon."
McVries laughed a little hysterically. — Stephen King

He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor. — J.D. Salinger

That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat. — J.D. Salinger

God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at! — J.D. Salinger

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.' — John Krasinski

Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. — J.D. Salinger

That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality's almost impossible to describe or account for straight out - it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility - and critics' attempts to reduce it to questions of "style" are almost universally lame. — David Foster Wallace

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty ... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. — J.D. Salinger

If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable. — J.D. Salinger

The funny part is, I felt like marrying her the minute I saw her. I'm crazy. I didn't even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to God I'm crazy. I admit it. — J.D. Salinger

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. — Bob Shacochis