J. D. Salinger Quotes

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people's houses. It's naive to think you won't carry anything into your life.

Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.

'House' was such a special part of my life.

I probably only cried five or six times in my life and I think four of those times was from my daddy kicking my butt.

I think sometimes people can get lost in the bigger special effects, science fiction, robot stuff, and those are cool and fun to watch, too, but I think it's so important to sometimes step back and watch something that's about life and human interaction.

I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holding hands. When Steve and I held hands, I had to keep looking down to marvel at it. There was my hand, the same hand I've always had - oh, but look! What is it holding? It's holding Steve's hand! Who is Steve? My three-dimensional boyfriend. Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever. I knew I would not mess things up by growing bored. I had done that once before.

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.

At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay. It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

But Sophie and Howl were holding one another's hand and smiling and smiling, quite unable to stop. "Don't bother me know," said Howl. "I only did it for the money." "Liar!"said Sophie. "I said," Michael said, "that Calcifer's come back!" That did get Howl's attention and Sophie's too.

I remember when I was shot down in that war. I remember how terrified I was. And it made me feel close to my family, and to God, and to life, and I was scared.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

'I want to touch people but if I touch them in real life they'll slap me.' That's what writing isit's a gross person getting a hug.

The first time he'd held her hand, it felt so good that it crowded out all the bad things. It felt better than anything had ever hurt.

My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

She could've looked at the tiny miracles in front of her: my feet, my hands, my fingers, the shape of my shoulders beneath my jacket, my human body, but she only stared at my eyes. The wind whipped again, through the trees, but it had no force, no power over me. The cold bit at my fingers, but they stayed fingers. "Grace," I said, very softly. "Say something." "Sam," she said, and I crushed her to me.

There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.

I-" said Nick, his voice halting. "I don't mind it as much when - when people touch me. Some people." Mae looked down, and Nick, who looked more relaxed when he'd been stabbed, slowly lifted his hand from his chest and laid it on the tumbled sheets between them, fingers half-curled into his palm. He was still regarding the ceiling with a fixed glare. "Because you trust them not to hurt you?" Mae asked tentatively. "No," Nick said, his voice harsh. "Because I'd let them hurt me.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

When I left you, Bella, I left you bleeding. Jacob was the one to stitch you back up again. That was bound to leave its mark - on both of you.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how will I live without [her] when she's gone?

It's too late. I've seen things...I've lost things you can't understand.

OCD, we discovered is a lot of different things-it's not just washing your hands, it's whatever you're obsessed with. It can be just the way you hold a pen, and you always have to have it a certain way or you have to eat your food, it depends. It's something that, as a character I thought was really interesting because sometimes it's used in a film where it is OCD and sometimes it's strategic.