Jan 08 2009
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Some exceptional Holden Caulfield thoughts”
As I read The Catcher in the Rye, I ear-tagged a few pages that I really got a kick out of. I did notice that as while this is my 4th time through this book, it is the first time through as a parent and well into my career. The book has a different meaning to me now than it did the 3 previous times I read it (once in high school and twice in college). Here are just a few passages from Holden that I thought you may enjoy.
“I’m lucky though. I mean I could shoot the old bull to old Spencer and think about those ducks at the same time. It’s funny. You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to a teacher. All of a sudden, though, he interrupted me while I was shooting the bull. He was always interrupting you.”
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you with the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
“I think I really like it best when you can kid the pants off a girl when the opportunity arises, but it’s a funny thing. The girls I like best are the ones I never feel much like kidding. Sometimes I think they’d like it if you kidded them-in fact, I know they would-but it’s hard to get started, once you’ve known them a pretty long time and never kidded them.”
“But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a goddam bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held my breath, for God’s sake. 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. She’s nervous as hell. Half the time she’s up all night smoking cigarettes.”
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff-I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”
“Here’s what he said: ”The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”“
