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Earl of Kent 48

LEAR

What art thou?

KENT

A very honest-hearted fellow, and as poor as the King.

LEAR

If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he’s for a king thou art poor enough. What wouldst thou?

KENT

Service.

LEAR

Who wouldst thou serve?

KENT

You.

LEAR

Dost thou know me, fellow?

KENT

No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.

LEAR

What’s that?

KENT

Authority.

LEAR

What services canst thou do?

KENT

I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly. That which ordinary men are fit for I am qualified in, and the best of me is diligence.

LEAR

How old art thou?

KENT

Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for anything. I have years on my back forty-eight.

William Shakespeare · King Lear

48

Mack

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

"I’m forty-eight and I ain’t as tough as he is..."

48

Leo Patimkin

Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth

"A forty-eight-year-old man with a three-year-old kid! She’ll give me thrombosis that kid..."

48

Ezekiel Farragut

Falconer

John Cheever

"He sat on the edge of his bunk. He was a man of forty-eight, sitting on the edge of his bunk in a prison to which he had been unjustly confined for the murder of his brother..."

48

Mr Mackennzie

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Jean Rhys

"He had made a fair sufficiency and then retired. He was forty-eight years old..."

48

George Follansbee Babbitt

Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis

"He was forty-eight; in twelve years he’d be sixty; he wanted to leave a clean business to his grandchildren..."

48

Thomas Buddenbrook

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie)

Thomas Mann

"The fact was that Thomas Buddenbrook, at forty-eight, had begun to count his days more and more, to reckon with the approach of death..."

48

Kenneth Marchal Toomey

Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess

"When I faced the shaving mirror each morning I saw a man of undoubted forty-eight years, uneasy, unloved except by his readers, weary, tinted by good living, chin sagging, hair greying and thinning but superbly sculpted by my regular operative at Trumper’s of Mayfair."