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Fifteen Years Old - P.B. Jones
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P.B. Jones 18

I had one suitcase, and it contained very little – only underwear, shirts, a bathroom kit, and numerous notebooks in which I had scribbled poems and a few short stories. I was eighteen, it was October, and I’ve always remembered the October glitter of Manhattan as my bus approached across the stinking New Jersey marshes. As Thomas Wolfe, a once-admired and now-forgotten idol, might have written: Oh, what promise those windows held! – cold and fiery in the rippling shine of a tumbling autumn sun.

Since then I’ve fallen in love with many cities, but only an orgasm lasting an hour could surpass the bliss of my first year in New York. Unfortunately, I decided to marry.

Truman Capote  ·  Answered Prayers

18

Unnamed Narrator

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Colin MacInnes

"As for me, eighteen summers, rising nineteen, I’ll very soon be out there among the oldies..."

18

Amory Blaine

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

""Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome...""

18

Tico Feo

'A Diamond Guitar'

Truman Capote

"Tico Feo was eighteen years old and for two years had worked on a freighter in the Caribbean..."

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Frédéric Moreau

Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

Gustav Flaubert

"Frédéric Moreau, having just taken his Bachelor’s degree, was returning home to Nogent-sur-Seine..."

18

John Kemp

Jill

Philip Larkin

"He was an undersized boy, eighteen years old, with a pale face and soft pale hair brushed childishly from left to right..."

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Christie Malry

Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry

B.S. Johnson

"He looked forward to his eighteenth birthday when a small rise was promised, if not due..."

18

Alex

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

"Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers. I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. "