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is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield

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The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn...more

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Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls,...more

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This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.

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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 mea...more

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I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal.

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Look at 'em,' he said. 'Goddam fools.' 'Who?' said Ginnie. 'I don't know. Anybody.

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The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand time...more

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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 - nob...more

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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 t...more

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Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

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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 t...more

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Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

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You ought to go to a boy's school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to b...more