For Esmé - with Love and Squalor: And Other Stories

by J.D. Salinger

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was – in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces – a stunning and final girl.

Boo Boo not only listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it.

‘Il faut que je parte aussi,’

‘Fathers and teachers, I ponder “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.’

He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. Mine started to seep through its container as early as the next morning,

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.’

They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.