Holden Caulfield Hyperbole Quotes

#1. Hannah Storm in a horrifying, horrifying outfit today. She's got on red go-go boots and a catholic school plaid skirt ... way too short for somebody in her 40s or maybe early 50s by now ... She's got on her typically very, very tight shirt. She looks like she has sausage casing wrapping around her upper body ... I know she's very good, and I'm not supposed to be critical of ESPN people, so I won't ... but Hannah Storm ... come on now! Stop! What are you doing? ... She's what I would call a Holden Caulfield fantasy at this point. #Quote by Tony Kornheiser

#2. 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. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#3. I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#4. Now ... in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. #Quote by Harper Lee

#5. Aaaand we have a winnerrrrr!" a man shouts into the mic in a singsong carnival voice as I lick the last of Patrick's ice cream from my fingers. "Pick out a prize for the beautiful girl."
"For you," Patrick says, kneeling in front of me with a moose in his outstretched hands.
I pull the stuffed animal to my chest. "Thank you. I shall love him always. I shall call him Holden Caulfield."
"From the book?"
"Yes, from the book. You were reading it when I saw you my first day here."
"You remember that?"
"It's one of my favorite books," I say.
"You were totally checking me out."
"Patrick! Not in front of Holden Caulfield!" I cover the moose's floppy ears with my hands, hoping neither he nor Patrick sees the red flooding my cheeks. #Quote by Sarah Ockler

#6. We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.
So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.
So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself. #Quote by John Green

#7. There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#8. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. - Holden Caulfield #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#9. And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#10. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#11. And I realize I've been betrayed by the two vices that fiction promised me I'd adore. Sal Paradise held up bottles of booze like a housewife in a detergent commercial. Holden Caulfield reached for his cigarettes like an act of faith. Even Huckleberry Finn tapped on his pipe with relief and satisfaction. If sex turns out to be this bad, I'm never reading again. #Quote by Craig Silvey

#12. Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period. #Quote by Josh Hutcherson

#13. I'm sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield, who is the main person in the book. The small part of me must be the Devil. #Quote by Mark David Chapman

#14. He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#15. Holden Caulfield people are the bane of my existence. #Quote by Autumn Doughton

#16. In what must surely be considered one of the great lost scripts of history (or a Saturday Night Live sketch), Chase brought his usual sensibility to a trial run, having Kevin discover The Catcher in the Rye and start smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and conversing with the shade of Holden Caulfield. #Quote by Brett Martin

#17. J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour. #Quote by David Lodge

#18. I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't you feel even worse. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#19. It's the hipsters," David said. "It's retro. They need a place to convene and argue whether Holden Caulfield was deep or just a spoiled brat. #Quote by T.J. Klune

#20. That's something that annoys the hell out of me- I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#21. the sentence im reading is terrific ... #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#22. What I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes. What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice. #Quote by J.D. Sallinger

#23. Money always ends up making you blue. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#24. Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men. This observation insults Amelia because it implies that she only reads books with classically romantic heroes. She does not mind the occasional novel with a romantic hero but her reading taste are far more varied than that. Furthermore, she adores Humbert Humbert as a character while accepting the fact that she wouldn't really want him for a life partner, a boyfriend, or even a casual acquaintance. She feels the same way about Holden Caulfield, and Misters Rochester and Darcy. #Quote by Gabrielle Zevin

#25. Jane Gallagher had wanted to know what time it was, but for some reason Holden Caulfield hadn't wanted Stradlater to tell her. When Stradlater refused to tell Holden Caulfieldwhether or not he had told Jane Gallagher what time it was, Holden Caulfield became enraged and attacked him in a fit or horological savagery, possibly because he was mentally ill and hated anyone byt him knowing what time it was #Quote by Frank Portman

#26. Royal Young's memoir is about a dreamer, set in the post- apocalyptic celebrity world of today, and Young, who grew up in New York - like Holden Caulfield if he wanted to be famous - is looking for adventure and action and becomes entangled in all sorts of romantic and sordid relationships. He points out the perplexing tragedy (and good fortune, I think) of what it means to be talented and rebellious, but not a celebrity. #Quote by Lily Koppel

#27. She was terrific to hold hands with. 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. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#28. I'd forgotten that all runaway stories end like this. Everyone goes home. Dorothy clicks her way back to Kansas, Ulysses sails his way home to his wife, Holden Caulfield breaks into his own apartment ... Here I was, just like Ian, just like Dorothy and everyone else, heading back home at last ... You think you can't go home again? It's the only place you can *ever* go. #Quote by Rebecca Makkai

#29. I am 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. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#30. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#31. Fictional Characters"


Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o'clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.

Maybe they grew tired
of the author's mind,
all its twists and turns.

Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they'd been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.

Wouldn't you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,

your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

"Fictional Characters" by Danusha Laméris from The Moons of August. © Autumn House Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission #Quote by Danusha Laméris

#32. If a body catch a body coming through the rye. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#33. I glance at the red-stenciled words crossing my chest - HOLDEN CAULFIELD IS MY HOMEBOY. #Quote by Lia Riley

#34. So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it's funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS. #Quote by E.L. Doctorow

#35. I was basically the Holden Caulfield of adult dating. #Quote by Camille Perri

#36. 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. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#37. Holden Caulfield is the embodiment of what we mean by the phrase "young adult" – too young to be a grown-up, but too wise to the world to be completely innocent. He's caught in the in-between, and that in-between is what all young adult authors write about. #Quote by David Levithan

#38. A Nation of Outsiders is smart, insightful, and politically astute. Grace Hale's analysis of the 'romance of the outsider' is necessary reading for anyone who has ever wondered about the meaning of our national obsession with 'authenticity'-as well as for anyone who might be curious about what Jerry Falwell and Holden Caulfield have in common. #Quote by Beth Bailey

#39. I'd never seen that look on another face before, had never identified it in another person. I'd only met with it in fiction. But everyone falls in love with Holden Caulfield when they're sixteen. They read Catcher in the Rye and don't feel so alone. #Quote by Tiffanie DeBartolo

#40. I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#41. 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. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#42. What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#43. Lawyers are alright, I guess - but it doesn't appeal to me", I said. "I mean they're alright if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides, even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn't. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#44. When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#45. the heart of the novel. Holden in New York where he has something close to a nervous breakdown. Caulfield narrates the story to us #Quote by Jonathan Coupland

#46. Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

- Holden Caulfield
The Catcher in the Rye #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#47. Dont's ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everyone- Holden Caulfield #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#48. We're all Holden Caulfield at fifteen, but when we grow up we want to be Atticus Finch #Quote by Shaun David Hutchinson