Rye Quotes

“Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Christopher felt a smile -his first genuine smile in a long time- pulling at his lips. "Does Miss Hathaway have many suitors?"

"Oh, yes. But none of them want to marry her."

"Why is that, do you imagine?"

"They don't want to get shot," the child said, shrugging.

"Pardon?" Christopher's brows lifted.

"Before you marry, you have to get shot by an arrow and fall in love," the boy explained.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon

“He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“If a body meet a body coming through the rye. Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I was nineteen at the time, and like any other besotted teenage girl, I was desperately eager to please the object of my affections. I didn’t argue the point, but set to work producing the desired loaf.
The result was barely chewable when it emerged hot from the oven. By the time it cooled, it seemed significantly more resistant to fire, flood, or earthquakes than my dormitory’s concrete walls. After a brief discussion, Gabriel and I both decided that this rye-brick was more appropriate food for crows than for humans. I carried the slab to the balcony of my eighth-floor dormitory apartment, expecting that a fall from that height would smash it to crumbs.
I peered over the edge to make sure no one was below me; I didn’t want to drop the hardened mass onto someone’s head and make a murderess of myself. After verifying that the concrete walkway below was clear, I dropped the rye-brick over the side of the balcony. Down, down, it plummeted—past the seventh floor, the sixth, the fifth … Nearly a hundred feet below, and traveling somewhere around eighty feet per second, the rye-brick finally hit the ground—and didn’t break.
Despite an eight-story drop onto concrete, the rye-brick maintained its integrity. One of my roommates inspected the situation and expressed surprise that the stones of the walkway itself remained unscathed.
I didn’t try making any wheat-free loaves for a while after that.”
― Sarah A. Chrisman, This Victorian Life: Modern Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Cooking, Fashion, and Technology