J. D. Salinger Quotes

I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

The whole campfire idea freaked Piper out. It made her think of that huge purple bonfire in the dreams, and her father tied to a stake. What she got instead was almost as terrifying: a sing-along.

I slammed the door in the child's face, a horrific scream trapped in my throat.

I was shooting at myself - I was shooting my own violence and the violence of the times

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.

For me, personally, the most difficult moments had to do with not just terrorist attacks, but also shootings.

I wanted to be kicked and hit and bruised up and beaten. It became something that was an absolutely necessary part of every day for me.

The man running toward me is not a man, he is a boy. A shaggy-haired boy with a crease between his eyebrows. Will. Dull-eyed and mindless, but still Will. He stops running and mirrors me, his feet planted and his gun up. In an instant, I see his finger poised over the trigger and hear the bullet slide into the chamber, and I fire. My eyes squeezed shut. Can't breathe. The bullet hit him in the head. I know because that's where I aimed it.

I think culture is where things change in us deeply. But right now, I think that people are very traumatised. They are very scared. Having grown up in a house with a perpetrator who was violent every day and terrorising every day, I feel like that this country is suddenly very much like the house and the family I grew up in. Every day we are glued to our phones, glued to our television; "What is this psychopath going to do next? How will he embarrass us? Who will he bully or hurt or humiliate today? It's so easy to get locked into a syndrome where the perpetrator is ruling your life.

I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.

When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

I'll put a bullet through my own brain. Let alone wait for stark to do it. Your sister will drive me to it, Howard. No offense.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

I was shaking all over, and it wasn't from the vampire. Memories have teeth, too.

As soon as she hit the door we start blastin', I saw her brains hit the floor, raw laughin'.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

Everyone wants to see someone shoot someone in the head.

I feel worthless. My girlfriend was attacked on the subway yesterday. And I can't even enjoy it.

Life is a velvet crowbar hitting you over the head, youre bleeding syrup amour, bleeding to death.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.

When it comes to how the slaves treat each other: If you've been brutalized all your life - if you have seen your children sold or your mother beaten and raped and you have been tortured yourself - you are not going to be up for your best behaviour. Even in the 21st century, 100 people in the midst of terrible suffering are not going to be their best people.