J.D. Salinger

Please let me know when I may come to see you.

It's lunch hour at the office, and I'm alone here writing you.

If my love for you has only led me to a new and great sorrow, only I am to blame.

What a mess I made of things, Miss Lester.

You represented the answer to everything to me.

I loved the way your lips were so slightly parted.

I have been in New York 4 years and think it is a great town, only once in a while you get pretty lonesome.

Will you please write me a letter sometime when you get the time? It gets pretty lonely here and I love you very much and maybe even you could come to see me some time, if you get the time.

There are still a few men who love desperately.

Please don't misunderstand me, Miss. I'm a magazine illustrator. My card. I'd like to sketch you more than I've ever wanted to sketch anyone in my life. Perhaps such an undertaking would be to a mutual advantage.

I beg your pardon. I love you very much. I'm nuts about you. I know it. I could love you all my life. I'm a printer's assistant and I make thirty dollars a week. Gosh, how I love you. Are you busy tonight?

She was a positive cure-all for a gigantic monster of loneliness which had been stalking around his heart since he had come to New York.

I was going to write a tender lovely boy-meets-girl story. What could be finer, I thought. The world needs boy-meets- girl stories. But to write one, the writer must go about the business of having the boy meet the girl. I couldn't do it with this one. Not and have it make sense.

The Heart Of A Broken Story

“Some people,” Edna said, “wanna be alone.”

My loss of you is very acute today.

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 do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.

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.

The minute I went in, I was sort of sorry I'd come.

Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.