"I just hope that one day - preferably when we’re both blind drunk - we can talk about it."

"In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw."

"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."

"I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse."

"Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos."

"He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse him of having created an ugly world."

"In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together."

"You can't exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes."

"I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window."

"She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty."

"Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all."

"The little girl on the plane Who turned her doll's head around To look at me."

"Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?"

"The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly."

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life."

"He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff."

"Why's it so sunny?" she repeated. Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said."

"One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of."

"The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be..."

"I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin."

"Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God."

"Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl."

"It’s history. It’s poetry."

"Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it."

"I'd never yell, "Good luck!" at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it."

"If a body catch a body coming through the rye."

"I have scars on my hands from touching certain people."

"Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly."

"Real ugly girls have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes."

"You take a really sleepy man, Esm , and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact."

"We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle."

"Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies"

"There isn’t a nightclub in the world that you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you’re with some girl that really knocks you out."

"Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?"

"People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you're not."

"I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead."

"It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window."

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?"

"How old are you? I asked her. "Old enough to know better." she said."

"Oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It's marvelously liberating."

"I’m not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him."

"Did you see more glass?"

"I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m around."