I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the uncertainty of self-awareness and decision-making until one actually takes action.
J. D. Salinger's quote delves into the complexities of self-awareness and the unpredictable nature of human behavior. It highlights the idea that we often cannot fully understand our intentions or potential actions until we are confronted with the moment of choice or action itself. The acknowledgment of the question as 'stupid' illustrates a common frustration with the philosophical inquiry into the self and the essence of decision-making.
In practice
In a discussion about the unpredictability of life choices.
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.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
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.
Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?
While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.
If you truly believe in the value of life, you care about all of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.
When I appeared before the draft board examiner during World War II, he asked me if I thought I could kill. "I don't know about strangers," I replied, "but friends, certainly."
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.
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