J. D. Salinger

Oh, it's lovely to see you!' Franny said as the cab moved off. 'I've missed you.' The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all.

There are still a few men who love desperately.

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.

He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.

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.

Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.

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 puberty.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.

In the first place, you’re way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself.

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?

The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be.

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

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

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.

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

Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.

I held hands with her all the time...that doesn't sound like much, I realize, but she was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something.

I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

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.