allusions

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse. (1.8)

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole […]. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that exactly. You'd just be different, that's all.

We had a reading assignment where we choose the book we wanted to read. Everyone said this was a book that needed to be read at least once, and I read all of the other books that these everyone’s said to read. My goal was to deride these people; nobody wanted to read huckleberry fin twice. I hated this book too, but nobody ever told me that was why the book is so special. It sticks in your mind somehow until you get ‘It’. This was the first book that ever sat with me. That doesn't mean I liked it particularly: I hated Holden for wasting his education and his parent’s patience just because he didn't want to be like the others, And in that sense, Catcher in the rye should be far away from any graduation speech. I especially hated that Ms. Riley said I’d have been great friends with this little shit.