death at 91
it was a crazy fiery red hunting cap, his fascination for the posterity of museums and his yearning to be the one to catch children falling off from a rye field that made me love holden caulfied fiercely.
i just found out today that j.d. salinger is dead.
i am at a loss for words. at this rare time, i cannot write laudatory words for a magnificent writer. i feel i will grieve his death more than i did other writers’ passing.
“Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
“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.”
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
“It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless—and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”
“I’m just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream.”
weigh his words. one should have known he was going to go like this: in silence; just skulking away with an urgency only he could understand.
quotes from The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.
