"Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will."

"It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes."

"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."

"If you weren't around, I'd probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddamn place. You're the only reason I'm around, practically."

"That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think."

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

"If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable."

"Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away."

"I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though."

"I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door." ( A Boy in France : Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945)"

"She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs."

"Sometimes I see me dead in the rain."

"If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did."

"But I'm Crazy. I swear to God I am."

"I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one."

"Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage."

"[...] don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."

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

"It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean, how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question."

"I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life."

"People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it."

"Give me an honest con man any day."

"You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it."

"That killed me."

"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?"

"Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason."

"There are still a few men who love desperately."

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

"If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet."

"My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking."

"I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing everytime you crossed a road."

"I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do."

"This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't."

"I know. I'm very hard to talk to. I realize that."

"The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding"

"You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of."

"Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all."

"I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."

"I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway."

"Where do the "ducks "go in the winter?"

"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."

"Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it."

"Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it."

"Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?' Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married."

"I live alone (but catless, I'd like everybody to know)...."

"He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor."

"Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly"

"He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving."

"They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way."

"She really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over - anywhere - her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows, and all, her ears - her whole face except her mouth and all."