Faith & Spirit Quote by J.D. Salinger

Disgust, not aloofness, powers that line: the exhausted realization that mere amiability has become a substitute for judgment. Salinger gives us a speaker who can still do the social choreography of “liking” people - being polite, being charmed, laughing at the right moments - but feels morally starved by it. “Liking” is easy, almost automatic, a soft consumer preference. “Respect” is costly. It demands standards, steadiness, an actual self to measure others against.

The little blasphemy - “I wish to God” - spikes the sentence with desperation. This isn’t a cool, misanthropic pose; it’s a plea for contact with something solid. The subtext is loneliness with a spine: the narrator isn’t just disappointed in other people, he’s disappointed in the version of himself who keeps settling for the pleasant. Respect would be proof that adulthood isn’t only compromise, that sincerity still exists somewhere outside the performance.

In Salinger’s postwar New York universe, this hits like a flare. The well-lit world of manners, prep schools, cocktails, and small talk can feel, to a sensitive skeptic, like a conspiracy of surfaces. “Sick” suggests not just boredom but contamination - as if constant low-grade phoniness has made the speaker physically ill. The line works because it weaponizes a simple distinction: affection without esteem is a dead-end intimacy. It’s the ache for a person - or a principle - that can survive scrutiny.