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. I know it's crazy.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for a simple, protective role in a chaotic world.
In this quote from J.D. Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye', the speaker shares a profound wish to be a 'catcher' who protects children from the dangers and complexities of adulthood. This metaphor highlights the longing for innocence amidst the inevitable challenges of growing up and the desire to preserve the purity of youth against the harsh realities of life.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about the importance of protecting childhood innocence during a parenting seminar.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Manner is personality—the outward manifestation of one’s innate character and attitude toward life.
The State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending.
Masonry is not a religion._x000D_ He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it.
Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too _x000D_ I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.
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