The languor of Youth -- how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth -- all save this -- come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought to have been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things are part of life itself; but languor -- the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse -- that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

Evelyn Waugh, via Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited