I'm 17 and I've never found a better description of what it's like to be a teenager. This might seem silly because obviously teens' emotions are super out of whack, but Joyce's description of Stephen is just so perfect. It all comes to a head at the end of chapter 2, when Stephen wanders around Dublin until he finds a prostitute and sleeps with her, and the catharsis in this moment is just so wonderful. I started crying and I can't keep reading.

I just can't get over how well passages like this:

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

sum up things that I feel all the time but have never put into words.

And it's all from a book whose first line was

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road...

Anyway, I'm sorry if this post is low quality, I'm kind of a mess right now.