Listen," he said. "If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be wi….

I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to pu….

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….

Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away..

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on..

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 pu….

The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?.

I don't hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert ….

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outward….

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 writt….

I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window..

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..

There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady..

There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked..

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac — with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact..

I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid quest….

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 se….

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how ….

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..

Sometimes I see me dead in the rain..

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody..