Menu
Search
Eight Years Old - Irma Albinus
Donate

Irma Albinus 8

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 (kamepa-obckypa - Camera obscura) (Trans. Vladimir Nabokov)

8

Bessie

The Enchanted Wood

Enid Blyton

"Bessie was eight that day. Her name was written in big sugar letters on the top: ‘BESSIE. A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!’"

8

Miss Clerricot

The Boarding-House

William Trevor

"They had come to her when she was eight years old and placed a pair of spectacles on that face..."

8

Judith Angstrom

Rabbit at Rest

John Updike

"Going to be nine in less than a month, the skinny girl is a sketch of a woman, less than life-sized and not filled in...."

8

Flora

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James

"... that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, that child!"

8

Moll Flanders

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders

Daniel Defoe

"I am but a little girl and I can’t do it..."

8

Jassy Radlett

The Pursuit of Love

Nancy Mitford

"Jassy only cared about money because she was saving up to run away..."

8

Scout Finch

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

"...for once he didn’t remind me that people nearly nine years old didn’t do things like that..."

8

Estella Hazard

Wise Children

Angela Carter

"...an old stager of eight..."

8

Antonie Buddenbrook

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

Thomas Mann

"...little Antonie, a petite eight-year-old in a dress of softly shimmering silk, was thinking hard, her pretty blond head turned slightly toward her grandfather..."

8

Pompey Casmilus

Novel On Yellow Paper or Work It Out For Yourself

Stevie Smith

"When I was eight years old I went away from my parents to a convalescent home..."