First Love

by Ivan Turgenev

My heart was fairly leaping; I was greatly ashamed and overjoyed; I felt an excitement I had never known before.

I sat down on a chair, and sat a long while, as though spell-bound. What I was feeling was so new and so sweet… . I sat still, hardly looking round and not moving, drew slow breaths, and only from time to time laughed silently at some recollection, or turned cold within at the thought that I was in love, that this was she, that this was love.

Emotion - expression from the core of the heart and brain.

And her face was ever changing, working too; it expressed, almost at the same time, irony, dreaminess, and passion. Various emotions, delicate and quick-changing as the shadows of clouds on a sunny day of wind, chased one another continually over her lips and eyes.

I saw her blush, and grew cold with terror. I had been jealous before, but only at that instant the idea of her being in love flashed upon my mind. ‘Good God! she is in love!’

Ahhh!!

The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions.

Passion is dangerous sometimes!

‘My son,’ he wrote to me, ‘fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison… .’ After his death, my mother sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow.

Poison? Maybe less than that or more than that. Context matters here

And I remember that then, by the death-bed of that poor old woman, I felt aghast for Zinaïda, and longed to pray for her, for my father – and for myself.

Loathsome!