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Thirty-Five Years Old - Jay
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Jay 35

He was sleeping in his wife’s bedroom again. That was part of the pact, that, and a vow that he would never travel abroad without her, that he would pay attention to her at parties, appreciate her more than he had been doing. He said yes to all her demands and thought that somehow they would not be exacted once she was over her spleen. He slept badly. He talked, shouted in his sleep and in the morning while being rebuked about it, he never inquired in case he might have said the other woman’s name. Her photo, the small snapshot of her, that he had kissed and licked so many times was in the woodshed along with the one letter that he had brought away out of the pile that he had left in her study for safety. It was the night of his thirty-fifth birthday, and they had parted but a week. He stood over his son’s bed telling himself that what he had done was the right thing. The little boy had one finger in his mouth and the other hand was splayed out like a doll’s.

‘It’s the hands that kill you, isn’t it?’ said his wife who had crept in to enjoy the moment of domesticity.

Edna O'Brien  ·  'Baby Blue'

35

Guy Clinch

London Fields

Martin Amis

"Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling no closer to life than to death, feeling thirty-five, Guy pressed on..."

35

Trader Faulkner

Night Train

Martin Amis

"I’m thirty-five. You begin to want to see a fresh face..."

35

Edward Rochester

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

Charlotte Brontë

"...he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five..."

35

Rollo Martins

The Third Man

Graham Greene

"Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year-old cheeks..."

35

John Claggart

Billy Budd, Sailor

Herman Melville

"Claggart was a man about five and thirty, somewhat spare and tall, yet of ill figure upon the whole..."

35

Randle Patrick McMurphy

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey

"McMurry, Randle Patrick. Committed by the state from the Pendleton Farm for Correction. For diagnosis and possible treatment. Thirty-five years old. Never married..."

35

Harry Goldweiser

Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Passos

"That’s the trouble with me. I’m thirtyfive an I dont care any more..."

35

Hermann Karlovich

Despair (Otchayanie)

Vladimir Nabokov

"I was, in fact, only in my thirty-sixth year, and the generous remainder of my life might be devoted to something better than a vile will-o’-the-wisp..."

35

Daniel Quinn

City of Glass

Paul Auster

"We know, for example, that he was thirty-five years old. We know that he had once been married, had once been a father, and that both his wife and son were now dead..."

35

John Self

Money: A Suicide Note

Martin Amis

"I am thirty-five years old. According to the last good book I read, this means that I am half way through my time travel, my travel through time..."