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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the social necessity of politeness and the pretense that often accompanies human interactions.
In this quote, J.D. Salinger captures the complexity of social interactions, emphasizing the need for individuals to mask their true feelings to maintain social harmony. The phrase 'Glad to've met you' symbolizes the polite facade people often put on, even when they feel the opposite. This can highlight the tension between authenticity and societal expectations, suggesting that surviving in society sometimes requires a level of disingenuousness.
In practice
During a networking event where you meet someone you don't particularly like but need to maintain a professional demeanor.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
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. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
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 written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
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?
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
There is no reconciliation until you recognize the dignity of the other, until you see their view- you have to enter into the pain of the people. You've got to feel their need.
When people say 'marriage' to me... It's always a means to an end. Everyone's so in a rush to define the relationship.
The white actresses I have known have been allowed to do 10 times more than I shall ever do.
The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.
Studies show that if people think that they are treated fairly by the police, that matters almost more than what the result is. If you get stopped for a traffic stop and feel that you are treated courteously and fairly, you are much more likely to accept the fact that you got a speeding ticket.
Good-Bye is an easy word to say but try saying it to a friend. If I never knew you, I'd be safe, but half as real, never knowing I could feel.
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