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.
Interpretation
The fear of competition can stem from a desire for validation and societal approval, leading to inner conflict.
In this quote, J.D. Salinger expresses a conflict between his desire for validation through competition and his shame for seeking external approval. He reflects on the societal pressures that shape individuals to crave recognition, leading to a struggle between the fear of failure and the fear of losing one's authentic self. This introspection reveals a deep yearning for personal authenticity over external accolades.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming self-doubt, this quote can illustrate the tension between aspiration and fear.
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.
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.
Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.
Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.
The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power.
If we are extremists, then we are not ashamed of it, for the conditions that our people suffer are extreme, and extreme illness can not be cured with moderate medicine
Here in America, we don't give in to our fears. We don't build up walls to keep people out.
Among many who sought to deter me, was one dear old Christian gentleman, whose crowning argument always was, "The cannibals! you will be eaten by cannibals!" At last I replied, "Mr. Dickson, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honouring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by cannibals or by worms."
You’re not leaving me here alone,” I say. Because if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena, trying to think my way out.
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