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.
• I am kind of a paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
• I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone…which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
• I wish…you could read letters you wrote 46 years ago. It is very painful reading.