Boy, I sat at that goddam bar till around one o’clock or so, getting drunk as a bastard. I could hardly see straight. The one thing I did, though, I was careful as hell not to get boisterous or anything. I didn’t want anybody to notice me or anything or ask how old I was. But, boy, I could hardly see straight. When I was really drunk, I started that stupid business with the bullet in my guts again. I was the only guy at the bar with a bullet in their guts. I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn’t want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
(Source: beyondstyx, via artgarfunkel-)
1 week ago - 
7
7
A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they’d be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
(Source: brandon1k)
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?
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
(Source: stillthewantingcomesinwaves)
Hide not thy tears on this last day
Your sorrow has no shame;
To march no more midst lines of grey;
No longer play the game.
Four years have passed in joyful ways—
Woulds’t stay these old times dear?
Then cherish now these fleeting days,
The few while you are here…
J.D. Salinger, Time magazine September 15, 1961
2 weeks ago - 4
4
A minor groundswell sounded behind the shower curtain, as though a rather delinquent porpoise were at play.
J.D. Salinger, Zooey
(Source: hydrocephalitic-listlessness)
3 weeks ago - 4
4
The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll’s head around
To look at me.
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
(Source: mitochondria)
I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,” Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.
J.D. Salinger, Teddy
(Source: doctorsax)
One thing about packing depressed me a little. I had to pack these brand-new ice skates my mother had practically just sent me a couple of days before. That depressed me. I could see my mother going in Spaulding’s and asking the salesman a million dopy questions—and here I was getting the ax again. It made me feel really sad. She bought me the wrong kind of skates—I wanted racing skates and she bought hockey—but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
(Source: stachebookclub)
Please get there, Buddy. He weighs about as much as a cat and he has that ecstatic look on his face that you can’t talk to. Maybe it’s going to be perfectly all right, but I hate 1942. I think I’ll hate 1942 till I die, just on general principles.
J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
1 month ago - 5
5
