The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

J. D. Salinger

Categorized in : Life Happiness Happy

And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy)

seats horror usual

I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.

able littles mean

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

responsibility writing believe

My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat

pockets ink brother

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.

meditation use firsts

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

loneliness new-york prayer

He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.

eye boys two

Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row. by J. D. Salinger

Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.

asks stills kings

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement. by J. D. Salinger

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

messiness arrangements

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even pra... by J. D. Salinger

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

artist real praise

It’s history. It’s poetry. by J. D. Salinger

It’s history. It’s poetry.

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.

touching dust light

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

degrees radio want

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

reading teaching book

I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

sick opposites people

The catcher in the rye... that's all I really want to be. by J. D. Salinger

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

catchers want

The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white - unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister's expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her - a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.

expression animal boys

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.

puberty phones girl

There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.

doing-you world thinking

She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something. Jane was different. We'd get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we'd start holding hands, and we wouldn't quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

girl moving thinking