"The catcher in the rye" de Jerome David Salinger (1951)

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours, and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

I gave her a good look […] She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell – with somebody’s mother. I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.

In New York, boy, money, really talks – I’m not kidding.

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

One time, in this movie, Jane did something that just about knocked me out. The newsreel was on or something, and all of a sudden I felt this hand on the back of my neck, and it was Jane’s. It was a funny thing to do. I mean she was quite young and all, and most girls, if you see them putting their hand on the back of somebody’s neck, they’re around twenty-five or thirty and usually they’re doing it to their husband or their little kid. […] But if a girl’s quite young and all and she does it, it’s so pretty it just about kills you.

The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl – a girl that isn’t a prostitute or anything, I mean, she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it.

Then I’d crawl back to my room and call up Jane and have her come over and bandage up my guts. I pictured her holding a cigarette for me to smoke while I was bleeding and all. The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.

And whenever he went to the can, he went to the can, he always left the goddam door open and talked to you while you were brushing your teeth or something. That stuff’s sort of flitty.

That’s the trouble with these intellectual guys. They never want to discuss anything serious unless they feel like it.

But I do say that educated and scholarly man, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with - which, unfortunately, is rarely the case - tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts to the end. And - most important - nine times out of ten, they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.

The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.