- "If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 17 - "Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 17 - "Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 18 - "Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 20 - "It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 21 - "You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22 - "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!... It's a poem. By Robert Burns.'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22 - "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 do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22 - "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24 - "This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24 - "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24 - "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 26
The Catcher in the Rye Quotes
By Esther Lombardi, About.com
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