If a body catch a body coming through the rye.

I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. 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.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac — with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.

Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.