Things Holden Caulfield Hates Quotes

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 1. Holden is a sensitive boy with strong feelings. He attaches importance to feelings. He feels terrible for flunking out of his fourth school and disgracing himself with the fencing team.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 1, opening words of book about his messed-up childhood. We are immediately introduced to a boy who is self-absorbed, isolated from his family, profane and deeply insecure.

You could also hear old Ackley snoring. Right through the goddam shower curtains you could hear him. He has sinus trouble and he couldn’t breathe too hot when he was asleep. That guy had just about everything. Sinus trouble, pimples, lousy teeth, halitosis, crumby fingernails. You had to feel a little sorry for that crazy sonuvabitch.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield in Chapter 5. Holden is not too fond of his next-door neighbor at Pencey and hardly ever went into his room: “it had a funny stink in it, because he was so crumby in his personal habits.”

I hate fist fights. I don’t mind getting hit so much – although I’m not crazy about it, naturally – but what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy’s face. I can’t stand looking at the other guy’s face, is my trouble. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something. It’s a funny kind of yellowness, when you come to think of it, but it’s yellowness, all right. I’m not kidding myself.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden in Chapter 13. Holden hates fist fights because he is strongly pacifist.

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. I know that’s impossible, but it’s too bad anyway.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 16, Holden is walking through Central Park and strikes up a conversation with a little girl, who suggests that he look at the Museum of Natural History with the Indians in it. He sets off in that direction, thinking of the field trips he took there as a kid, when everything was sweet and innocent, and the museum never seemed to change. Holden simply hates growing up. Part of his depression is the knowledge that his desire to keep things the way they are is impossible.

In the first place, my parents are different religions, and all the children in our family are atheists. If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Chapter 14, Holden nails his colors to the mast by declaring he is an atheist and tells how he hates “Holy Joe” ministers.

I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoyed the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden talks about the Bible in Chapter 14. And – surprise, surprise, he favors the outcast as opposed to the “chosen” one.

“You ought to go to a boy’s school sometimes. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together.”

– J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield to Sally Hayes in Chapter 17. To Holden the whole point of education is to make you rich, so it’s phony. And he really hates cliques.

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.
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