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Fifty-Seven Years Old - Mrs Jill Forster
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M. Pierre 60

M. Pierre was a plump grey man of sixty, with a pathetic, mean little mouth, a monocle in his eye. He was a short and vain little dandy and was given to boastfulness. The town was a gay place in the summer, like a pink flower opening by the peacock sea, and M. Pierre was the butterfly that flutters about it. He had the hips of a woman. He was full of learned little proverbs and precise little habits. Certain hours he would devote to lying on a couch and reading detective stories in a darkened room. At another time he would sit in his dining-room with a patent cigarette-making machine, winding the handle, meddling with the mechanism, turning out the cigarettes. He gave a lick to each one as it came out. “So he won’t have to offer you one,” Coram said.

V.S. Pritchett  ·  ‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does’

60

Ben Crader

More Die of Heartbreak

Saul Bellow

"... no Romeo and Juliet has ever been written for lovers sixty years old..."

60

Earl Angstrom

Rabbit, Redux

John Updike

"...he becomes one of the hundreds of skinny whining codgers in and around this city, men who have sucked the same brick tit for sixty years and have dried up with it..."

60

William Bankes

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

"Mr Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering his age, turned sixty..."

60

Isaac Braun

‘The Old System’

Saul Bellow

"He hated such objects, hated the stink of hospitals. He was sixty years old. He knew the route he, too, must go, and soon...."

60

Woody Selbst

‘A Silver Dish’ 

Saul Bellow

"This sudden big heartache in a man of sixty, a practical, physical, healthy-minded, and experienced man, was deeply unpleasant..."

60

Judge Henry Bissop

The Life and Loves of a She Devil

Fay Weldon

"The judge himself, even at sixty, was a wonderfully handsome man..."

60

Reverend Horace Pedrick

Couples

John Updike

"Reverend Horace Pedrick was a skeletal ignorant man of sixty. His delusions centred about money. He had never himself had enough..."

60

Mynheer Peeperkorn

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)

Thomas Mann

"...malleable youth felt crushed beneath the weight of this broad-shouldered, red-faced sixty-year-old, with white flames that encircled his head, painfully ragged lips, and a long, narrow beard that reached down to his high-buttoned, clerical-style vest."