the catcher in the rye II

Finished the book last weekend. And like the first time, it left me dissatisfied. i wanted more.
Despite his constant swearing, his perpetual depression, his seemingly ungrounded hatred and intolerance towards almost all things alive, Holden Caulfield is a beautiful character with a good soul. i can't help but feel that his emotional turmoil is a result of being too empathetic without meaning to. he feels for people. he is sensitive to the misfortune of others. too sensitive even, that these things bring him down lower than he already is from his own problems.

"I took her dress over to the closet and hung it up for her. It was funny. It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up for her. I thought of her going in a store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably just thought she was a regular girl when she bought it. It made me feel sad as hell - I don't know why exactly."

Other favourite TCITR quotes:

"If you do something too good, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more."

"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."

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish 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."

"You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favour. Just because they're crazy about themself, they think you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favour."

"Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something. Jane was different. We'd get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we'd start holding hands, and we wouldn't quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were."

"All you have to do to depress somebody is give them a lot of phony advice while your looking for your initials in some can door."

"That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."

"I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another "Fuck you" on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand, but it was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible."

"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say 'Holden Caulfield' on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'Fuck you.' I'm positive, in fact."

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he want's to live humbly for one."

"...Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field ot 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. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."