"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."

"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."