Certain things 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.

More from The Catcher in the Rye

• Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
• She looked nice, smoking. She inhaled and all, but she didn't wolf the smoke down, the way most women around her age do. She had a lot of charm. She had quite a lot of sex appeal, too, if you really want to know.
• And I don't just mention it, for God's sake, to show you I was once an Emotional Young Person Just Like Yourself.
• She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she reached puberty.
• The handpiece lay detached from its catch, waiting for Franny. It looked almost as dependent as a human being for some acknowledgment of its existence.
• You can’t just walk out on the results of your own hankerings.