I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that formal education or literacy isn't necessary for gaining knowledge and insight.
In this quote, J. D. Salinger highlights that one can gain a wealth of understanding and wisdom through reading, regardless of their formal literacy skills. It suggests that the act of consuming literature is more significant than the technical ability to read and write, emphasizing the importance of learning and self-improvement through experience and curiosity.
In practice
In a speech about lifelong learning, you might say, 'As J. D. Salinger once remarked, I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot, reminding us that knowledge comes from curiosity, not just education.'
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.
Small people delight in what they call consistency-that is, it gives them immense pleasure to say that they believe now exactly as they did ten years ago. This simply amounts to a certificate that they have not grown-that they have not developed-and that they know just as little now as they ever did. The highest possible conception of consistency is to be true to the knowledge of today, without the slightest reference to what your opinion was years ago.
It is wise not to seek a secret, and honest not to reveal one.
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
As the water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it, so a wise man adapts himself to circumstances.
People should be more like animals . . . they should be more intuitive; they should not be too conscious of what they do while they do it.
In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.