Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates how language can create vivid imagery and evoke emotion, much like the interplay of islands and water.
In this quote, J. D. Salinger uses metaphor to depict the way each phrase a person speaks can transport listeners to a unique, isolated experience, akin to how an island exists surrounded by water. The 'miniature sea of whiskey' suggests a richness or depth in the way expressions are imbued with personal meaning, shaped by the 'liquid' influence of their surroundings, ultimately highlighting the power of language in evoking nostalgia and familiarity.
In practice
A writer might use this quote in a speech about the importance of word choices in storytelling.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
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.
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
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.
I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.
To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
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