Novels, Deep-Read · J. D. Salinger · No.74
J. D. Salinger · 1951
Monday afternoon in Central Park, and the rain has suddenly started coming down as if someone tipped a bucket. A tall sixteen-year-old with a streak of grey on one side of his head sits on a bench, soaked through, wearing a red hunting hat — a hat his ten-year-old sister has just pulled out of his coat pocket and put on his head with her own hands.
The carousel keeps turning. The little girl in the blue coat comes round and round, and every time she passes a certain spot she leans out to grab for the gold ring. He is afraid she will fall. He doesn't say a word.
Afterwards he says that, at that moment, he was so happy he very nearly cried.
A sixteen-year-old prep-school boy, expelled just before Christmas and afraid to go home, drifts around New York for three days and two nights with a wad of cash, meeting every kind of "phony" he can find and planning to vanish out West and live as a deaf-mute; the person who finally stops him isn't an adult at all but his ten-year-old sister — and when he tells us all this, he is in a rest home in California.
J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) was a New Yorker. The Catcher in the Rye came out in 1951 and is his only novel. Holden Caulfield had already turned up in his short stories in the 1940s; Salinger landed in Normandy with the US Army, and his biographers say he carried draft chapters of the book through the war. Afterwards he published only a few story collections — Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and others — stopped publishing altogether after 1965, and lived in seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, until his death.
Its place in the map: the most famous postwar American novel to let a teenager tear into the adult world in his own voice, with his own swearing and his own verbal tics — and, read closely, something much closer to a case history.
The narrator starts by striking a pose. If you want to hear where he was born and how lousy his childhood was and what his parents did before they had him — all that "David Copperfield kind of crap" — forget it. He'll only tell you about the "madman stuff" that happened around last Christmas, just before he got run down and had to come out "here" to take it easy. Where "here" is, he doesn't say yet.
Pencey Prep, Pennsylvania, a Saturday in December. The whole school is at the big football game; Holden Caulfield stands on a hill and watches from a distance. He's manager of the fencing team, and that morning in New York he left the team's foils on the subway, so the meet was off and nobody spoke to him on the train back. More to the point: he has failed four subjects out of five — he passed English — and the school has told him not to come back after Christmas. This is not the first school to let him go.
He goes to say goodbye to Mr. Spencer, his history teacher. Spencer means well, but he does it in the most painful way possible: he reads Holden's exam paper aloud to him — an essay about how the ancient Egyptians turned their dead into mummies, Seed ①padded and thin, with a little note at the end begging for mercy. Then he tells Holden that life is a game and you have to play it by the rules. Holden, privately: depends which side you're on.
While the old man drones on, Holden's mind wanders. He thinks of the little lagoon near Central Park South: when it freezes over in winter, where do the ducks go? Seed ②The question arrives out of nowhere, and it will keep arriving.
Back in the dorm. That morning in New York he paid a dollar for a red hunting hat with a long peak, which he insists on wearing turned round to the back. Ackley, the pimply kid next door with the dirty fingernails, says it's a deer-shooting hat. No, says Holden, it's a "people shooting hat." Seed ③It's the book's first joke, and it's also a piece of armour a sixteen-year-old has found for himself: a loud hat worn the wrong way, so that people can tell at a glance he isn't one of them.
His roommate Stradlater is handsome and a "secret slob" — he looks immaculate and shaves with a rusty razor. He has a date that night and wants Holden to write his English composition for him: describe a room, or a house. Then Holden hears who the date is with — Jane Gallagher — and can't sit still. He knew Jane one summer in Maine. When she played checkers she kept her kings in the back row and never moved them. Once her stepfather came out on the porch and Jane said nothing, and a tear dropped onto the board, and Holden sat beside her and kissed her all over her face — eyes, nose, forehead — everywhere but her mouth. He has remembered it for two years, and has never once phoned her.
He sits down to write the composition and doesn't write about a room. He writes about a baseball glove: the left-handed fielder's mitt that belonged to his younger brother Allie, covered — fingers, pocket, everywhere — with poems in green ink, so Allie would have something to read out in the field when nobody was up at bat. Seed ④Allie was two years younger, the smartest and the kindest in the family, red-haired. Three summers ago, in Maine, Allie died of leukemia. Holden was thirteen. That night he slept in the garage and broke every window in it with his fist; he tried to do the station wagon's windows too, but his hand was already smashed. Even now it aches when it rains, and he can't make a proper fist.
Stradlater comes back from his date and says the composition is off-topic: he asked for a house, and Holden wrote about a lousy glove. Holden tears it up. He asks whether Jane still keeps her kings in the back row, then what the two of them did in the car. Stradlater just grins. Holden goes for him and ends up with a bloody nose. That night he decides: he won't wait till Wednesday, he's leaving now. He sells his typewriter to a classmate, puts on the hat, yells a goodnight to the whole corridor calling them all morons, and carries his bags out the door.
On the train, a well-dressed woman sits down beside him. Her son is at Pencey, and Holden knows the son to be one of the biggest rats in the school. But looking at the mother, he starts improvising: her boy is terribly popular, terribly modest; everyone wanted him for class president, only he wouldn't let them. He calls himself "the most terrific liar" you ever saw — his own words. Yet this lie is a gift: a mother gets off that train happy.
In New York he can't face going home. He checks into a seedy place called the Edmont. In the cab he asks the driver: those ducks in Central Park — where do they go in winter? The driver thinks he's being kidded.
The night is a string of wrong doors. In the hotel lounge he dances with three women from Seattle who have come to New York to spot film stars, and ends up paying their whole tab. He takes a cab down to a jazz club in Greenwich Village; the second driver gets testy about the ducks but volunteers a theory about fish: when the lake freezes, the fish just stay in the ice and soak up nourishment through their pores. Nobody answers the question he is actually asking. At the club he runs into an ex-girlfriend of his older brother D.B. — D.B. who was a real writer once and now writes scripts in Hollywood, which Holden calls "prostituting" himself. He slips away.
Back at the hotel, Maurice the elevator man asks if he wants a girl: five bucks. The girl is called Sunny, about his own age, in a green dress. She takes the dress off, and all he wants is to talk; he says he's just had an operation and isn't up to it. He hangs her green dress in the closet so it won't wrinkle. He pays the five and sends her off. A little later Maurice comes back with Sunny and says the price was ten. Holden argues, and starts crying; Sunny takes five from his wallet and Maurice punches him in the stomach.
Lying on the floor, he runs a movie in his head: he's the tough guy who's been shot, staggering downstairs clutching his gut, plugging Maurice, and then Jane comes to bandage him. It is the funniest passage in the book and the most frightening — because when the fantasy is over, he says he felt like jumping out the window.
Sunday. He makes a date with Sally Hayes for an afternoon play. At breakfast he meets two nuns with a cheap old suitcase; he insists on giving them ten dollars and has a lovely talk with one of them, an English teacher, about Romeo and Juliet.
He goes to Broadway to buy his little sister Phoebe an old record. On the way he sees a family coming out of church: the parents on the sidewalk, and a boy of six or so who insists on walking in the street, right along the curb, singing "catch a body coming through the rye" (chapter 16). Holden says it made him feel less depressed. He doesn't explain why.
He walks into the park to look for Phoebe, doesn't find her, and stands outside the Museum of Natural History. What he always loved about it was that nothing in there ever changes — the only thing that's different each time is you. Certain things, he thinks, ought to stay the way they are; you ought to be able to stick them in a glass case and leave them alone. And then he doesn't go in.
After the play he and Sally go skating, and he suddenly blows up: he hates school, he hates New York, he hates people who talk about cars. He proposes they drive off tomorrow morning to the woods in New England, live in a cabin, chop their own wood in winter. Sally says that after he's been to college and they're married there'll be plenty of marvellous places to go. He says something very ugly; she cries; he leaves alone. He never really wanted to go anywhere with Sally — he just needed someone to say yes.
He rings Jane; no answer. That evening he meets Carl Luce, an older boy from a previous school with a reputation as the expert on sex, and drunkenly pesters him with questions until Luce tells him he should see a psychoanalyst, and leaves.
Half drunk, Holden goes into Central Park to look for the ducks himself. It's freezing; his hair has bits of ice in it; the lagoon is half frozen. He walks the whole way round and finds no ducks at all. Payoff ② ↑This is a hard move: the duck question was never about ducks. It was a boy who doesn't know where to go when winter comes, asking about himself. He sits on a bench shivering; the record for Phoebe fell and broke into fifty-odd pieces earlier in the evening.
He sneaks home past a new elevator boy and into D.B.'s empty room, where Phoebe likes to sleep. She wakes and throws her arms round him. Then she does the arithmetic: you're home early. You got kicked out again. She buries her face in the pillow. Daddy's going to kill you.
She accuses him: you don't like anything. Not true, he says. Name one thing, then. One. He thinks for a long time. He thinks of the nuns. Then of a boy called James Castle, who said an older boy was conceited, was locked in a room by a gang who wanted him to take it back, wouldn't, and jumped out the window — wearing a turtleneck sweater he'd borrowed from Holden. Finally he says: I like Allie. Allie's dead, says Phoebe. You can still like somebody who's dead, Holden says — and anyway, what I like is sitting here talking to you.
Phoebe doesn't buy it. What do you want to be, then? A lawyer? A scientist? What he wants to be, he says, is the catcher in the rye. Seed ⑤He describes it: a huge field of rye, thousands of little kids playing in it, and no grown-ups around except him. He's standing at the edge of a cliff, and whenever a kid comes running without looking where he's going and is about to go over, Holden comes out of nowhere and catches him. Phoebe corrects him: the poem goes "if a body meet a body," not "catch." Holden has heard "meet" as "catch," and turned a song about two people meeting and kissing into a song about rescue. The boy singing along the curb that afternoon was singing exactly his misheard version. He picked the word up from one child and announced it as his life's calling to another.
Their parents come home. He hides in the closet while his mother tucks Phoebe in. When she's gone he gets ready to leave and asks Phoebe for a loan; she gives him all her Christmas money. He takes it and suddenly starts to cry. Before he goes, he leaves her his red hunting hat.
He goes to Mr. Antolini, his old English teacher — the man who, the day James Castle jumped, was first to reach the body, covered it with his own coat and carried it to the infirmary. Antolini lets him in late at night and, between highballs, talks to him seriously: he thinks Holden is riding for a fall, a special and terrible kind — the kind where the person falling never feels himself hit bottom, he just keeps falling. He writes out a line for him from an Austrian psychoanalyst: the immature man wants to die nobly for a cause; the mature man wants to live humbly for one (paraphrased).
Holden, exhausted, sleeps on the couch. He wakes in the dark to find Antolini sitting on the floor beside him, stroking his head. He jumps up, babbles something about getting his bags, and bolts. That kind of "perverty" thing, he says, has happened to him about twenty times since he was a kid.
He sits out the rest of the night on a bench in the waiting room at Grand Central. By morning he's having doubts: maybe Antolini just liked patting guys' heads while they slept? He has no answer. Neither do we.
Monday morning he walks up Fifth Avenue, and something strange happens: every time he steps off a curb at the end of a block, he feels he'll never reach the other side — that he'll just go down, and down, and disappear. So at every crossing he talks to his brother: Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. And when he gets across, he thanks him. Payoff ④ ↑The owner of the glove covered in green ink has been dead three years, and has become the only god Holden can pray to. Stradlater said the composition was off-topic. It was the one thing in the book that wasn't.
He's decided: he'll go West, hitchhike, find somewhere nobody knows him, work at a filling station and pretend to be a deaf-mute, so nobody can make stupid useless conversation with him ever again. First he wants to say goodbye to Phoebe and pay her back. He leaves a note at her school asking her to meet him by the door of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at a quarter past twelve.
On a stairwell wall at the school he sees an obscenity scrawled in pencil. He rubs it out with his hand. On the next floor there's another, scratched in with a knife; it won't come off. Even if you had a million years, he says, you couldn't rub out all of them in the world.
Waiting at the museum, two little boys ask him where the mummies are. He takes them into the Egyptian tomb and explains as they go: the Egyptians wrapped the faces of the dead in cloths treated with some secret chemical, so they wouldn't rot for thousands of years. He says he likes it in there, it's peaceful. Then, on the wall, he sees the same obscenity again, in red crayon. Payoff ① ↑The flimsy mummy essay Spencer read aloud to his face in act one has turned into the one thing he can teach a child. And the mummy itself is exactly the glass case he wanted at the Natural History museum — keep a person, and never let them change. In the place most like a glass case, the scrawl has got there first.
Phoebe arrives dragging a big suitcase stuffed with clothes, wearing his red hat. She's coming with him. No, he says, you're going back to school, you're in the play. She cries, he loses his temper, she pulls off the hat and practically throws it in his face. She won't speak to him and walks off towards the zoo on the other side of the street; he walks along on his side, the street between them.
They reach the carousel. He buys her a ticket; she picks a big brown beat-up horse. The kids are all reaching for the gold ring. He is scared she'll fall off, and he says nothing and does nothing. If kids want to grab for the gold ring, he thinks, you have to let them; if they fall, they fall, and it's bad to say anything. Payoff ⑤ ↑Standing next to a child who really could fall, for the first time he decides not to catch her. The catcher's dream isn't refuted by anyone. He sets it down himself, gently, next to a carousel.
Phoebe rides, gets off, takes the red hat out of his coat pocket and puts it on his head. Then the rain comes pouring down. All the parents run for cover under the carousel roof; he stays on the bench and watches her go round and round in her blue coat. Payoff ③ ↑The "people shooting hat" from act one has made a full circuit — his head, Phoebe's head, thrown back in his face — and ends up placed on him by her hands. The hat gave him quite a lot of protection, he says, in a way, but he got soaked anyway. The armour has turned into a present; it can't keep the rain off, but she gave it to him. He doesn't care. He feels so happy he nearly bawls.
The last chapter is barely a page. He isn't going to tell us about going home, or how he got sick, or what school he's going to in the autumn. There's a psychoanalyst here who keeps asking whether he's going to apply himself when he goes back in September. Stupid question, Holden says: how do you know what you'll do till you do it?
And then the final lines. Telling all this, he says, has made him miss the people he told about — Stradlater, Ackley, even Maurice. "Don't ever tell anybody anything." (chapter 26) If you do, you start missing everybody.
If this story has a fuse, it isn't the expulsion and it isn't Stradlater's date. The fuse is a summer in Maine three years earlier: an eleven-year-old dies of leukemia, and his thirteen-year-old brother smashes every window in the garage. Everything afterwards — the endless "phony," the hatred of anything that changes, the wish to keep things in glass cases, the dream of standing at the cliff edge catching every child — is aftershock from that night: a boy who couldn't catch his brother wants to catch all the children in the world. The moment by the carousel is the first time he admits he can't, and shouldn't.
Allie's death takes less than a page, and it's slipped into a comic scene: Holden ghost-writing homework for his roommate while the roommate is out with the girl Holden likes. He describes the poems on the glove, Allie's red hair, how he broke the windows, in exactly the tone he uses for Ackley's teeth.
Why does it hit so hard? Because the point of view belongs to someone who refuses to mourn. Salinger won't let him cry or say "I miss him"; he only lets him say that the hand still won't close. At this point we have no idea how much the episode weighs. Only when Phoebe asks what he likes, only when he's praying on Fifth Avenue, do we look back and see that the throwaway paragraph was the foundation of the whole book. And Stradlater calling the essay off-topic is the author winking at us: Holden goes off-topic all the time, but he always goes off in the same direction.
The Sunny scene is the most precisely paced passage in the novel. It begins as comedy: a terrified customer inventing an operation, a bored prostitute sitting on his lap. Then one tiny action — he takes the dress she's dropped and hangs it up so it won't wrinkle.
Then the tempo tightens: Maurice, the haggling, the punch. Then it releases into a ludicrous gangster-movie daydream. And halfway through your laugh the narrator adds, flatly, that he felt like jumping. Salinger's cruellest technique is exactly this — the comic rhythm keeps running while tragedy slips in by the side door, and by the time you notice, it's too late.
Holden's mouth never stops: commentary, sarcasm, digression, abuse. In the last scene he barely speaks. All that's left is rain, a bench, a blue coat, the gold ring, the horses going round. He even goes out of his way to tell you the nice thing about a carousel is that it always plays the same old songs.
Why is it so powerful? Because for the first time he is next to something that stays the same, and he doesn't need to lock it in a glass case. A carousel is a glass case that moves: it goes round and round and always comes back to where it was, playing the same tune. And for the first time he can sit and watch, without running in. The scene gets its force from three hundred pages of noise — you have to have heard him talk that much to hear him go quiet.
Almost all the novel's magic is in its voice. Holden has a full kit of tics — "it killed me," "and all," "if you want to know the truth." He admits outright that he is "the most terrific liar" you ever saw (chapter 3) — a narrator who warns you in advance not to believe everything he says.
The cleverness is that his lies and the truths he sees are often two faces of the same thing. He lies to the mother on the train because he can see she needs comforting; he rails against phoniness and then admits he is forever telling people he's glad to have met them when he isn't. We learn to read on two levels at once: on top, a boy complaining; underneath, a boy asking for help.
And something easy to miss: the whole story is told from "here." The opening refusal — I'm not going to give you the David Copperfield stuff — and the closing advice — don't ever tell anybody anything — undercut each other. He says he won't tell; he tells a whole book; and when he's done he finds the price of telling is missing everybody. This is someone being healed by telling, and hurt by it too.
A "catcher" is the baseball player whose job is to receive the ball, and the image of reaching out to catch is the whole point. The book's title comes from its hero mishearing a song. Burns's poem is about meeting — two people meeting in the rye, and what's the harm in a kiss; Holden turns it into catching.
The mishearing is itself a diagnosis. To want to meet someone you have to accept that they'll change, leave, grow up; to want to catch them is to be afraid of every fall. The novel doesn't let any adult tell him he's got it wrong. The person who corrects him is a ten-year-old — exactly the kind of child he wants to catch. The catcher in the rye is the one at the cliff edge most in need of being caught.
One · The phoniness Holden sees through — is it the truth, or a boy's excuse for not growing up?
Spencer's rules, the school's advertising, Sally's "after you've been to college" — Holden calls all of it phony. Let's put the opposing case first, at full strength — Antolini's case. Most of what Holden calls phony is the lubricant that lets a society run: courtesy, rules, deferred gratification, politeness to people you don't like. Refusing all of it sounds honest, but in practice it makes other people pay: Sally ends up in tears, Spencer's kindness is mocked behind his back, Phoebe nearly throws away a school term for him. That's what the line Antolini copies out means: dying nobly for a cause is easy; living humbly for it is hard. Maturity isn't surrendering to phoniness. It's understanding that you have to make a little bit of something real, in an imperfect world, alongside imperfect people.
The other side is just as strong. When adults say "that's just growing up," they often mean "that's just habit." What Holden sees is real: an alumnus who got rich in the undertaking business, gave the school a dormitory wing, and tells the chapel how he talks to Jesus while he's driving; a gifted brother writing films he despises. If every generation learns to shut up at a certain age, then we will always need a sixteen-year-old to say it out loud. His mistake isn't seeing through things. It's that, once he has, he can't find a third way.
Where does the author stand? Salinger's own answer came a decade later in Franny and Zooey, where Zooey tells his collapsing sister that every one of the vulgar audience she despises deserves her best performance. That answer doesn't overturn Holden; it tells him that once you've seen through people, you still have to go on loving them. Bring it home: the first time you saw that something at work or at home was "fake," what did you do — say so, walk out, or learn to live alongside it? And looking back now, was that living-alongside maturity, or surrender?
Two · Should you stand at the cliff and catch them? — the gold ring
In the end Holden decides not to pull back the sister leaning out for the gold ring. When you see someone you love about to take a risk you know will hurt, do you stop them?
Make the case for catching first, as strongly as it can be made. The cliff is real. James Castle really did go over; Holden himself very nearly did, on Fifth Avenue; the words on those walls really were written where small children would see them. A responsible adult is supposed to move the knife out of a child's reach, to postpone some subjects for a few years, to keep a ten-year-old in school rather than let her drag a suitcase out West — and when Holden refuses Phoebe outside the museum, that is a catch, and it's the right one. Not catching is sometimes not respect but laziness.
And the other side: the gold ring is worth reaching for precisely because you might fall. Holden wants to rub out every obscenity in the world and finds a million years wouldn't be enough; he wants to put everything in a glass case and finds the scrawl beside the mummies. Protection taken to its limit is not letting someone live. The irony is that this very book has spent decades being pulled from American classrooms by parents and school districts, in the name of protecting children. Those people are standing exactly where Holden stands in his dream: at the edge of the cliff.
The novel leans towards letting go, but it never says catching is wrong — it just gives Holden his first practice in the gentlest possible setting, a carousel rather than a cliff. Bring it home: the last time you stepped in to stop someone, was it because the thing was truly dangerous, or because you couldn't bear to watch them take the risk?
Three · Antolini's hand: how do you judge an act you can't read?
Late at night, a teacher who has been kinder to you than anyone is stroking your head in the dark. Holden runs; by morning he wonders if he got it wrong. The novel never settles it.
Put the case that he was right to run, at full strength. A grown man who has been drinking all evening sits beside a sixteen-year-old boy's couch in the dark and touches him — a line has been crossed, and no further evidence is required. Holden says this has happened to him about twenty times since he was a kid; his body recognised the danger before his mind did. The instincts of someone who has been hurt should not have to produce evidence first.
But the other side can't be waved away. Antolini is the only person in the book who picked up James Castle's body, the only one who opened his door at midnight and talked seriously to Holden about his fall. If the gesture was nothing but a clumsy, drunken attempt at comfort, then Holden pushed away the last adult at the moment he needed one most. Treating every ambiguous kindness as a threat can leave a person entirely alone.
Salinger's skill lies in refusing to judge for you. Bring it home: you've surely had moments like this — something someone said or did that, however you turn it over, has two readings. Did you decide by what you felt in the moment, or by everything you knew about that person? And what has each way of deciding cost you?
Salinger kept circling three fixations. First, children are the only people not yet dirtied. Besides Phoebe there's the thirteen-year-old English girl in "For Esmé — with Love and Squalor," from Nine Stories, whose letter lets a soldier broken by the war finally sleep; and in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" the young man on the beach who can only really talk to a little girl.
Second, the dead brother. After Allie comes Seymour, eldest of the Glass family — the genius who shoots himself at the end of "Bananafish." In Salinger's world someone too good always leaves first, and the people left behind don't know how to live.
Third, withdrawing from the world. Holden wants to go West and play deaf-mute; Salinger himself moved to the country not long after this book came out and published nothing after 1965. The Catcher in the Rye is the first and most innocent link in that chain: it poses the question — this world is phony, can I get out of it? — and everything he wrote afterwards gives answers that grow more complicated and harder to read.
"A rich kid's whining." The commonest complaint is that Holden is a privileged Manhattan boy who can afford hotels and taxis and gets taken in and thrown out by one expensive school after another; the phoniness he rails against is something only people with no money worries have the leisure to rail against. There's something to this, but the novel knows it: Holden recalls hiding his expensive suitcases under the bed so his roommate with the cheap ones wouldn't feel bad — he knows perfectly well that money draws lines between people; he just doesn't know what to do about it.
A monotonous voice. Some critics argue that one voice can't carry a whole novel, and that the tics repeat to the point of mechanism. Defenders reply that this is the point: we see the world only through the eyes of someone falling apart, so of course everyone else is blurred.
A history of banning. The book has been one of the most frequently challenged in American schools and libraries, appearing repeatedly on the American Library Association's lists of most challenged books. In December 1980, Mark David Chapman was carrying a copy when he was arrested for shooting John Lennon — a book about a boy who doesn't want to hurt anybody, claimed by a killer.
The author himself. In seclusion, Salinger guarded his work fiercely: he refused to sell film rights, and in 2009 he sued over an unauthorised sequel built around a seventy-six-year-old Holden-like figure, which a court barred from publication in the United States. In 1998 the writer Joyce Maynard published a memoir about living with Salinger when she was eighteen and he was fifty-three; in 2000 his daughter Margaret published one describing a harsh and eccentric father. None of this changes the novel, but many readers now find it hard to set "protecting the innocence of children" and its author comfortably side by side.
① The whole book is three days and two nights: a boy sliding towards the cliff edge and, at the last moment, stopping himself.
② The fuse isn't at Pencey but in Maine: a little brother died, a big brother smashed every window, and from then on he wanted to catch all the children in the world.
③ "Where do the ducks go in winter" was never about ducks; it was someone who didn't know where to go asking about himself. He went to the lagoon to look, and the answer was empty.
④ The "people shooting hat" was armour; after a full circuit, placed back on his head by a ten-year-old, it became a gift.
⑤ The catcher comes from a mishearing: the poem says meet, he heard catch. People who want to meet accept that others leave; people who want to catch are afraid of every fall.
⑥ He wanted to put everything in a glass case — and even on the wall of the Egyptian tomb, the scrawl had got there first.
⑦ He calls himself the most terrific liar alive, but his lies are often the other face of the truths he sees.
⑧ The novel won't rule on Antolini's hand. A wounded boy and the man trying to help him may both be right — or may each have wrecked the other.
⑨ If kids want to grab for the gold ring, let them: the would-be catcher at the cliff edge learns, for the first time, to let go.
⑩ Don't ever tell anybody anything; if you do, you start missing everybody — and with that sentence, he has told us the whole book.