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Forty Years Old - George Mole
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George Mole 40

Tuesday February 3rd

My mother has not done any proper housework for days now. All she does is go to work, comfort Mr Lucas and read and smoke. The big-end has gone on my father’s car. I had to show him where to catch a bus into town. A man of forty not knowing where the bus stop is! My father looked such a scruff-bag that I was ashamed to be seen with him. I was glad when the bus came. I shouted through the window that he couldn’t sit downstairs and smoke but he just waved and lit up a cigarette. There is a fifty pounds’ fine for doing that! If I was in charge of the buses I would fine smokers a thousand pounds and make them eat twenty Woodbines.  

Sue Townsend  ·  The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾

40

Paul Hollis

'The Summer Farmer'

John Cheever

"...a man of forty with signs of mortality in a tremor of his right hand, signs of obsoleteness in his confused frown..."

40

Adrian Leverkühn

Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend (Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde)

Thomas Mann

"I am getting on in years, already forty..."

40

Freddy Malins

'The Dead'

James Joyce

"The latter, a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel's size and build, with very round shoulders..."

40

Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere

Billy Budd, Sailor

Herman Melville

"Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere, to give his full title, was a bachelor of forty or thereabouts ..."

40

Denis Burlap

Point Counter Point

Aldous Huxley

"One’s forty, one has lived more than half one’s life, the world is marvellous and mysterious..."

40

Yvars

‘The Silent Men’ (Les muets)

Albert Camus

"At forty he’s not yet in a wheelchair, but he’s definitely heading in that direction..."

40

Gilbert Osmond

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James

"He was a man of forty, with a high but well-shaped head, on which the hair, still dense, but prematurely grizzled, had been cropped close..."

40

Unnamed Protagonist

'Lassies Are Trained That Way'

James Kelman

"Here he was a grown man, forty years of age, and he still missed his mammy..."

40

Humbert Humbert

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

"...our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party..."

40

Gwyn Barry

The Information

Martin Amis

"‘Have you any thoughts’, the interviewer was saying, ‘on turning forty?’"

40

Richard Tull

The Information

Martin Amis

"Looking in the mirror now, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard felt that no one deserved the face he had..."

40

Unnamed Narrator

Notes From Underground (Zapíski iz podpól'ya)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I have been living like this for a long time now – about twenty years. I am forty."