What are some family-related quotes in The Catcher in the Rye?

The Catcher in the Rye is full of quotes about family. Here are three to start, with a little information about each of them.

The very first sentences of the novel are about family:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an 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. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.

This passage reveals Holden's attitude towards his own early life, or at least, it reveals how Holden feels about talking about his childhood. Here as well the reader can find some interesting information about how Holden perceives his parents and their protectiveness of their privacy.

Later in the novel, in part 5, Holden mentions his brother:

He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways.

This passage is also revealing as Holden is somehow simultaneously open and honest about a very sensitive family tragedy, while he is cagey about his family at the same time. He doesn't describe the not-nice behaviors in any detail, but the reader knows that they exist.

This passage about family can be found in part 15:

My father's quite wealthy, though. I don't know how much he makes––he's never discussed that stuff with me––but I imagine quite a lot. He's a corporation lawyer. Those boys really haul it in. Another reason I know he's quite well off, he's always investing money in shows on Broadway. They always flop, though, and it drives my mother crazy when he does it. She hasn't felt too healthy since my brother Allie died. She's very nervous. That's another reason why I hated like hell for her to know I got the ax again.

Holden is clear here about his guilt and his sense of responsibility for his mother's happiness, but he is less clear about how he feels about his father and his father's career. This lack of transparency makes for some interesting opportunities for literary analysis as the reader can go in a lot of different directions with the evidence here.

“But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a g***m bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held my breath, for God's sake. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you. She's nervous as h***. Half the time she's up all night smoking cigarettes.”

Holden Caulfield offers this account of his parents as a way of projecting his own angst and dissatisfaction with his own life. His father’s propensity to sleep and be completely undisturbed represents the father’s negligence to mentor and love Caulfield, while his mother’s nervousness and apparent insomnia represents Caulfield’s own jaded perspective of society and the world around him.

“The show wasn't as bad as some I've seen. It was on the crappy side, though. It was about five hundred thousand years in the life of this one old couple. It starts out when they're young and all, and the girl's parents don't want her to marry the boy, but she marries him anyway. Then they keep getting older and older. The husband goes to war, and the wife has this brother that's a drunkard. I couldn't get very interested. I mean I didn't care too much when anybody in the family died or anything. They were all just a bunch of actors.”

Caulfield’s blunt personal review of a play powerfully pictures his perspective on family. “They were all just a bunch of actors” represents his feelings toward his own family—they are so removed from his own sense of person and identity that at best they are simply faking and acting out a false reality. He cannot get emotionally invested in the “pretend” family in the play because he has no basis for emotional investment in a “real” family. The goings on of his own family, whether it is marriage, disease, or death, feel as distant and vain as a fleeting and otherwise meaningless stage play.

What are some quotes about adolescent violence in The Catcher in the Rye?

In The Catcher in the Rye, there are many instances of violence perpetrated by and against Holden. One of the critical cases is not a scene in the book but told in summary by Holden about his past.

Throughout the story, Holden continues to come back to the story of his brother, Allie. Allie was Holden’s younger brother who died of leukemia years before. Holden has idealized Allie in his head, talking about how he was the best and kindest of his family members and seeing Allie as virtually perfect.

One of Holden’s only violent episodes happens on the night that Allie died. Holden recounts the story in the novel,

I was only thirteen, and they were going to have my psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. (Chapter 5)

Holden smashes the windows in the garage with his bare hands—he is so upset that he breaks his hand in the violent episode. This story, told in summary, is essential because it shows how adolescents deal with broader issues like death and loss with violence. Holden has to be psychoanalyzed after the breakdown because he was so violent that he broke his hand.

This isn’t the same as his violence against Stradler later in the novel, because that is him fighting back against injustice and a bully. The breaking of the windows is a different type of uncontrollable violence that comes out of the emotional strain of youth dealing with loss. The episode with the windows helps us understand Holden through the rest of the novel—his depression, his dislike to other people, and his constant conversation and focus on his brother. Holden is dealing with grief through the story, and one way he does that is by violence.