Catcher Quotes

In groups, analyze the following quotations. Attempt to make

connections to other parts of the text.

• “I damn near gave me kid sister Phoebe a buzz, though. I certainly felt like talking to her on the phone. Somebody with sense and all” (Salinger 66).

• “She’s all right. You’d like her. The only trouble is, she’s a little too affectionate sometimes” (Salinger 68).

• “She [Jane] was the only one, outside my family, that I ever sowed Allie’s baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it” (Salinger 77).

• “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” (Salinger 78).

• “If you was a fish, Mother Nature’d take care of you, wouldn’t she? Right? You don’t think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?” (Salinger 83)

• “Imagine giving somebody a feel and telling them about a guy committing suicide at the same time! They killed me” (Salinger 86).

• “I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though” (Salinger 87).

• “what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy’s face. I can’t stand looking at the other guy’s face is my trouble” (Salinger 90).

• “I know you’re supposed to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy” (Salinger 95).

• “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. I thought of her going to the store and buying it, and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably thought she was a regular girl” (Salinger 96).

• “She was a pretty spooky kid. Even with that little bitty voice she had, she could sort of scare you a little bit. If she’d been a big old prostitute, with a lot of makeup on her face and all, she wouldn’t have been half as spooky” (Salinger 98).

• “I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it” (Salinger 99).