The Catcher in the Rye Quotations

You know how in my previous blog I said that that was the last blog I was going to write for The Catcher in the Rye.  Well I was wrong.  I am actually going to write two more, that way I reach twenty-five blogs overall.  That will be my half-way point.  In this blog, I am going to explain a couple of popular quotations that are in the novel. 

            The first quote is when Holden went to visit Mr. Spencer.  “’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” (Salinger 8).  Mr. Spencer was Holden’s previous history teacher at Pencey Prep.  He was telling Holden that he needs to go through life by playing n the rules.  In his life, Holden felt like he was on the other side of everyone else.  He felt alienated from the world.

            The second quote is when Holden decides to kill time before his date with Sally and goes to the Museum of Natural History.  “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you” (Salinger 121).  For some reason, I really enjoyed reading this line from the novel.  I can relate to Holden because along with him I do not like change.  The life-sized historical figures in the exhibits do not move which emits the possibility of change.  Holden feels like he can understand the life in the museum because it is frozen in time.  He wishes his life would stay frozen because he does not want to grow up and enter the adult world. 

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Print.