My Salinger Year Quotes
"I want to write my own poetry, not analyze other people's poetry."
"Publishing had not been part of my plan—but the concept of fate appealed to me."
"That will make you more appealing to some editors, less appealing to others."
"This is a wonderful agency. An old, venerable agency."
"Better to pass as experienced, seasoned. I was one of them now."
"The only sound was the wind. An untouched mantle of snow stretched evenly from the shops."
"I knew nothing about publishing, nothing about literary agencies, nothing about this specific literary agency."
"The books so ubiquitous on the contemporary bookshelf I barely noticed them."
"I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages."
"I spend so much time thinking. Or editing. Or, just, figuring out difficult things."
"Things were happening. I wasn’t becoming part of something. I was already part of something."
"I wanted everything. So, I’d thought, had Jenny."
"I couldn’t buy a cup of coffee at the L without running into several people I knew."
"For me, this was heaven, heaven that could only be improved by Jenny moving in down the street."
"It’s driving me insane. Every two seconds I get ten new e-mails about NOTHING."
"I think about Holden a lot. He just pops into my mind’s eye and I get to thinking about him dancing with old Phoebe or horsing around in front of the bathroom mirror at Pencey."
"When I think about him I usually get a big stupid grin on my face. You know, thinking about what a funny guy he is and all. But then I usually get depressed as hell."
"Most people don’t give a flying hoot about what you think and feel most of the time."
"Just when you get to thinking about what a funny guy he is and all, you usually get depressed as hell."
"It's hard for him to get around the fact that it’s all lies."
"Every guy in the world is looking at every woman in the world and deciding whether he would sleep with her or not."
"But I knew—I knew—that Salinger would not. He would have taken his failure as deserved."
"He surrounded himself with fools—the broken, the failed or failing, the sad and confused—so that he might be their king."
"An A earned by trickery means absolutely nothing."
"He didn’t want people on the World Wide Web all day, doing whatever they do."
"You can’t go around revealing your goddam emotions to the world."
"But it is the only way. An A earned by trickery means absolutely nothing."
"If you desire an A or at least a passing grade, there’s only one way to earn it: you must study and do the work assigned to you."
"Don’t call me Buba," I shouted. "I’m not a child."
"I call you Buba," he said, "because I love you."
"You love me." My voice had slowed. I seemed to be talking through a stream of molasses.
"I don’t know what an electronic book is, but I’m not giving away the rights to it."
"He was embroiled in a sort of"—he waved his hands around as if to conjure the appropriate word—"scandal. It’s not clear what happened."
"I’ll write you again soon. I can hardly wait."
"Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all."
"You love me, but you don’t want to bring me to Marc’s wedding?"
"It goes without saying, I suppose, that I now understood why the fans wrote to him, not just wrote to him but confided in him, confided in him with such urgency, with such empathy and compassion, with such confession."
"You’re participating in the production of art," my college boyfriend told me. "Whether you’re making it yourself or shepherding it into the world. You’re doing the right thing. Just stay in the world."