list 43 of my favorite quotes

7. “The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.) Since I have spoken of my schoolboyish agitation over Marketa, I should point out that it stemmed not so much from my being in love as from my awkward lack of self-assurance, which weighed on me and came to rule my thoughts and feelings much more than Marketa herself.” Milan Kundera, The Joke

8. “The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models- those that are in fashion, that suit, that please- and enact them.” Milan Kundera, The Joke

9. “Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.” Milan Kundera, The Joke

10. “I was terror stricken. A thousand times since my last meeting with Lucie I had turned over in my mind everything I’d said to her, everything she’d said to me, a hundred times I cursed myself, a hundred times justified myself, a hundred times convinced myself I’d driven her away for good, a hundred times reassured myself she’d understand and forgive me.” Milan Kundera, The Joke

11. “I had always liked to tell myself that Lucie was something abstract, a legend and a myth, but now I knew that behind the poetry of these words hid an entirely unpoetic truth: that I didn’t know her; that I didn’t know her as she really was, as she was in and to herself. I had been able to perceive (in my youthful egocentricity) only those aspects of her being that were turned directly to me (to my loneliness, my captivity, my yearning for tenderness and affection); she had never been anything to me but a function of my own situation; everything that went beyond that concrete situation, everything that she was in herself, had escaped me. But if she was really a mere function of my situation, it was logical that when that situation altered (when another situation succeeded it, when I grew older and changed), my Lucie vanished with it, because from then on she was only what had escape me in her, what had not concerned me, what was beyond me.” Milan Kundera, The Joke

4. “That is something up with which I will not put.” Winston Churchill

5. “Si on my presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Montaigne, Essais

6. “Je tremble en voyant ton visage/ Flotter avec mes désirs,/ Tant j’ai de peur que mes soupirs/ Ne lui fassent faire naufrage.” Tristan l’Hermite, “Le promenoir…”

1. “A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sheep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.”

2. “He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? ... He still tried to think what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?”

3. “The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld… They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.”

All three from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. I found this work sublime and in many ways related to the main character Stephen Dedalus; in fact I relate so much to him and was so moved by this book that I could say it changed my life.