Important Quotations Explained
1. “Life
is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”
“Yes,
sir. I know it is. I know it.”
Game, my
ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are,
then it's a game, all right—I'll admit that. But if you get on the
other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game
about it? Nothing. No game.
2. [Ackley]
took another look at my hat . . . “Up home we wear a hat like that
to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That's a deer shooting
hat.”
“Like hell it is.” I took it off
and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim
at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people
in this hat.”
3. The
best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed
right where it was. Nobody'd move. . . . Nobody'd be different.
The only thing that would be different would be you.
4. .
. . 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'd
do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.
5. “I
have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of terrible, terrible
fall. . . . The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some
time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own
environment couldn't supply them with. . . . So they gave up looking.”
