If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that a person's charm or appeal can overshadow minor inconveniences like being late.
In this quote, J. D. Salinger humorously emphasizes the idea that the positive impression someone makes—such as their appearance or demeanor—can make one overlook minor annoyances like tardiness. It reflects the notion that personal connections and charisma often hold more weight than punctuality in social interactions.
In practice
In a light-hearted conversation about relationships, this quote could remind friends not to take small issues too seriously.
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.
The white actresses I have known have been allowed to do 10 times more than I shall ever do.
No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.
It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.
It's getting to the point where I am no fun anymore, I am sorry. / Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud, ' I am lonely.' / I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are, you make it hard.
When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.
But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.
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