“He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.”
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oxford University Press, 2000.
This line to me is really, really eye-catching. It really brings the reader back to the feeling of being a child and wishing you could be older, stronger, etc., which is an obviously important detail when you’re reading Stephen’s story.