First love

We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving: we may appear to ourselves to be as much in love at other times – so does a day in early September, though it is six hours shorter, seems as hot as one in June. And on how that first true love-affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 8