The year is 1948, perhaps 1949. It’s early December, and the ponds in Central Park have just frozen over for the winter. Young, mordant Holden Caulfield is aimlessly wandering the streets of Manhattan, leaving a smoldering trail of cigarette butts in his wake as he—wait. There’s something wrong…
Then, all of a sudden, I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I did it so nobody could hear me, but I did it. It scared the hell out of old Phoebe when I started doing it, and she came over and tried to make me stop, but once you get started, you just can’t stop on a goddam dime. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed when she did it, and she put her old arm around my neck, and I put my arm around her, too, but I still couldn’t stop for a long time.
The Catcher in the Rye- J. D. Salinger
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
“So, Holden Caulfield is often dismissed by teenagers for being a whiny little Nathaniel Hawthorne who hates his life but never does anything to change it. And frankly, the idea that your third-rate first world problems can be the subject of great literature is a bit difficult to swallow. This is where … it becomes relevant that J. D. Salinger saw more of World War II than almost any other American. The great American war novels of that generation—Catch 22, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Naked and the Dead, were all written by men who saw far less of war’s horror than J. D. Salinger did. He was on Utah Beach on D-Day, at the Battle of the Bulge, and he was one of the first Americans to enter a liberated concentration camp. And yet Salinger returned home and wrote not about war but about Holden Caulfield bumming around New York City. So, you can say that the stakes aren’t high in this novel, but as Salinger well knew, the cruel and phony world of adults doesn’t just treat people like Holden Caulfield poorly, it kills them.”
– John Green, “Crash Course Literature: Holden, JD, and the Red Cap” (via hamletrash)
“She really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over - anywhere - her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all, her ears - her whole face except her mouth.”
– The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (via krazkastra)
“…I can’t be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”
