Great moments in literature #5

You think me jaded and effete. You are mistaken. If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes,..., if your body and mind... are so lithe and tender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap..., there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words.

- 16-year-old Marcel Proust, to a classmate who had jilted him