"‘My age is my affair. In fact, I am in my fifty-first year.’"

"Tía was about fifty and rail thin and couldn’t put anything in her hair to make it forget itself..."

"Come on, Mim. You’re only fifty..."

"She had a pencil over her ear and the point of it showed through her grey-black hair. She was about fifty...."

"... that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to sit ..."

"... as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her to live ..."

"Madame Vauquer is about fifty years old, and she resembles all women who have had a peck of troubles..."

"I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing..."

"It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by child-bearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful..."

"...she was variously described as a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a pushover, a Lesbian, and a faithful wife. Without being an old maid, she was, like most self-made women, rather old maidish..."

"So I lean affirmation across the café table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile.."