Three Score & Ten

When I was eight years old I came home from school one morning pretending to be seriously ill. My mother indulged me. She put me into my pyjamas, carried me to the sofa in the living-room and wrapped me in a blanket. She knew I had come home to monopolize her while my father and two sisters were out of the house. Perhaps she was glad to have someone at home with her during the day. Till the late afternoon I lay there and watched as she went about her work, and when she was in another part of the house I listened closely. I was struck by the obvious fact of her independent existence. She went on, even when I was away at school. These were the things she did. Everybody went on.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

The baby was at first red and wrinkled like a toy balloon on its decline. Soon, however, her face smoothed out and after a year she began to speak. Now, at the age of eight, she was far less voluble, for she had inherited her mother’s reserved nature. Her gaiety, too, was like her mother’s – a singular unobtrusive gaiety. It was just a quiet delight in one’s own existence with a faint note of humorous surprise at being alive at all – yes, that was the tenor of it: mortal gaiety.

 Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark