The first passage of writing with which I fell in love is from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—when Stephen is on the beach, just before he sees the girl in the tide.

An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.... He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures, of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.