Phoebe Caulfield Quotes

New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. I kept wishing I could go home and shoot the bull for a while with old Phoebe.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 12. Holden is experiencing a sense of isolation and longs for human connection. He misses a time when he was not so depressed. His sister Phoebe is one of the non-phonies that helps him keep his fragile connection with the world.

You’d like her. I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about. I mean you can even take her anywhere with you. If you take her to a lousy movie, for instance, she knows it’s a lousy movie. If you take her to a pretty good movie, she knows it’s a pretty good movie.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 10, the first time Holden speaks about his younger sister Phoebe at length. His words show how much he cares about her. He loves her because he can easily connect with her.

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 times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 17, Holden visits the Museum of Natural History with his sister Phoebe. This is one of his favorite places to visit because no matter what he knows that it will always be the same and history will not have changed. Holden is fighting to hold onto his childhood in fear of growing up.

When the light was on and all, I sort of looked at her for a while. She was laying there asleep, with her face sort of on the side of the pillow. She had her mouth way open. It’s funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they’re asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don’t. Kids look all right. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 21, when Holden sneaks back into the family home to visit his sister Phoebe. She looks funny to Holden sleeping with her mouth open, whereas adults in that position look “lousy.” Phoebe represents the innocence of all children to Holden.

While I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them – all cockeyed, naturally – what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it. I figured it was some perverty bum that’d sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I’d smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I knew that. That made me even more depressed.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 25. Holden has a tough time understanding that everyone has to grow up. He does not want children to grow up because he feels that adults are corrupt. Here he tries to take away bad words from the walls of an elementary school where his sister Phoebe attended.

Then I took my hunting hat out of my coat pocket and gave it to her. She likes those kind of crazy hats. She didn’t want to take it, but I made her. I’ll bet she slept with it on. She really likes those kind of hats.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 23. Holden gives Phoebe his prized hunting hat, the symbol of his uniqueness and innocence and desire to be separate from everybody else. Having spent some time with the one person he really connects with, his sacrifice of the hat is a sign of his recognition that he does have ties and relationships are important to him.

All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden in Chapter 25. The gold ring on the carousel in a symbol of the worldly success most of us try to reach for. Holden is saying here that you have let children make their own mistakes and not try to correct them. He has previously said that he wants to be a catcher in the rye, protecting little kids from harm. He now realizes that it is a futile job.

“I said I’m not going back to school. You can do what you want to do, but I’m not going back to school,” she said. “So shut up.” It was the first time she ever told me to shut up. It sounded terrible. God, it sounded terrible.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 25, Phoebe utters these defiant words to Holden as he refuses to let her leave town with him. He is upset that he has pushed Phoebe to the point of telling him to shut up, a form of profanity. Children’s innocence should be protected, he believes, and he has failed to do this with Phoebe, which troubles him greatly.
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