Wit & Attitude Quote by J.D. Salinger

The line lands like a shrug that’s secretly a diagnosis. On its face, it’s a breezy bit of locker-room gallantry: beauty absolves inconvenience. Underneath, it’s Salinger distilling a whole teenage value system into one glib punchline, where desire isn’t just strong, it’s allowed to rewrite etiquette. “Swell” matters; “late” doesn’t. The sentence is engineered to feel obvious, even righteous, which is the point: it exposes how quickly people turn attraction into a moral alibi.

Salinger’s intent isn’t to offer dating advice so much as to capture how boys learn to talk about girls when they’re trying to sound worldly. The profanity (“who gives a damn”) is doing cultural work. It’s swagger and defensiveness at once, a way to preempt embarrassment by pretending you don’t care about the thing you very clearly care about. “Nobody” seals the performance with fake consensus, as if the speaker can draft the entire audience into his appetite.

Contextually, it sits inside Salinger’s broader project: rendering adolescence as a place where sincerity and phoniness constantly impersonate each other. The charm of the line is that it’s funny in the way an ugly truth can be funny. You can hear the cadence of casual cruelty: the girl’s time is negotiable, her appearance is not. It’s a miniature of mid-century gender economics - the male gaze as currency, the female body as the receipt - delivered with the effortless snap of someone too young to recognize he’s already repeating the script.