Catcher in the Rye Quotes

I shook my head. I shake my head quite a lot. “Boy!” I said. I also say “Boy!” quite a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen. It’s really ironical, because I’m six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head – the right side – is full of millions of gray hairs. I’ve had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true. I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 2. Holden has been expelled from his fourth school for failure to earn passing grades in four out of five classes. His favorite teacher Mr. Spencer, instead of wishing him a pleasant good-bye, gives him the standard lecture from an adult to a teenage slacker. Holden is disappointed. His defensiveness is linked to his deep anxieties about identity – in this case whether he is every inch an adult. He isn’t.

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 1. Holden is a sensitive boy with strong feelings. He attaches importance to feelings. He feels terrible for flunking out of his fourth school and disgracing himself with the fencing team.

Old Selma Thurmer – she was the headmaster’s daughter – showed up at the games quite often, but she wasn’t exactly the type that drove you mad with desire. She was a pretty nice girl, though. I sat next to her once in the bus from Agerstown and we sort of struck up a conversation. I liked her. She had a big nose and her nails were all bitten down and bleedy-looking and she had on those damn falsies that point all over the place, but you felt sort of sorry for her. What I liked about her, she didn’t give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 1.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 1, opening words of book about his messed-up childhood. We are immediately introduced to a boy who is self-absorbed, isolated from his family, profane and deeply insecure.

So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It really was. 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 at bat. He’s dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. […] God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 5. Holden cannot understand why his brother Allie who was much cleverer than him died. He feels guilty that he, who lives because he is not sick like Allie was, is stupid and inferior. The baseball glove reminds him of the kind of person his brother was: smart, friendly and inventive. This is the emotion at the center of Holden’s journey throughout the novel.

You could also hear old Ackley snoring. Right through the goddam shower curtains you could hear him. He has sinus trouble and he couldn’t breathe too hot when he was asleep. That guy had just about everything. Sinus trouble, pimples, lousy teeth, halitosis, crumby fingernails. You had to feel a little sorry for that crazy sonuvabitch.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 5. Holden is not too fond of his next-door neighbor at Pencey and hardly ever went into his room: “it had a funny stink in it, because he was so crumby in his personal habits.”

He started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down on his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God – talk to Him and all – whenever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving in his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 3. He is talking here about Ossenburger, a Pencey alumnus who has made a fortune in the undertaking business.

I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 2. The ducks are symbolic of Holden. He wonders what happens to them the same way as he worries about what will happen to him when he grows up and becomes an adult.
Life is a game that one plays according to the rules - J. D. Salinger quote In Game

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”
“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.”
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right – I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 2. Exchange between Holden and his history teacher Mr. Spencer who talks to him about playing the game of life by the rules. Both have cynical views about society and the world. Out loud and to his face Holden agrees with Mr. Spencer, but in his head he curses him. Holden feels isolated and looks upon the rich kids at his schools at “phonies.”

“Listen. What’s the routine on joining a monastery?” I asked him. I was sort of toying with the idea of joining one. “Do you have to be a Catholic and all?”
“Certainly you have to be a Catholic. You bastard, did you wake me just to ask me a dumb ques – ”
“Aah, go back to sleep. I’m not gonna join one anyway. The kind of luck I have, I’d probably join one with all the wrong kind of monks in it. All stupid bastards. Or just bastards.”
When I said that, old Ackley sat way the hell up in bed.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t care what you say about me or anything, but if you start making cracks about my goddam religion, for Chrissake – ”
“Relax,” I said. “Nobody’s making any cracks about your goddam religion.” I got up off Ely’s bed, and started towards the door. I didn’t want to hang around in that stupid atmosphere any more.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 7, Holden wakes schoolmate Ackley up in the middle of the night to ask if you need to be a Catholic to join a monastery.
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