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Eight Years Old - Antoine Roquentin
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Antoine Roquentin 30

Twelve hundred francs a month isn’t a fortune. But if I economize a little it should be enough. A room for three hundred francs, fifteen francs a day for food: that leaves four hundred and fifty francs for laundry, incidentals, and the cinema. I won’t need new clothes for a long time. Both my suits are clean, even if they’re a little shiny at the elbows: they’ll last me another three or four years if I care of them.

Good lord! Is it I who is going to lead that mushroom existence? What am I going to do all day long? I’ll go for walks. I’ll go and sit in the Tuileries Gardens on an iron chair – or rather on a bench, to save money. I’ll go and read in the libraries. And then what? Once a week the cinema. And then what? Shall I go and play croquet with the pensioners in the Luxembourg Gardens? At the age of thirty! I feel sorry for myself. There are times when I wonder if I wouldn’t do best to spend in one year the three hundred thousand francs I have left – and afterwards … But what would that give me? New suits? Women? Travel? I’ve had all that, and now it’s over, I don’t feel like it any more: not for what I’d get out of it!  A year from now I’d find myself as empty as I am today, without even a memory and afraid to face death.

Thirty years old! And an annual income of 14,400 francs. Dividend coupons to cash every month. Yet I’m not an old man! Let them give me something to do, no matter what…

Jean-Paul Sartre  ·  Nausea (La Nausée) (Trans. Robert Baldick)

30

Richard Tull

The Information

Martin Amis

"He was thirty, and Oxonian, and still handsome..."

30

Hamlet

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

William Shakespeare

""I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years...""

30

Septimus Warren Smith

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

"Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat..."

30

Tom Buchanan

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"...he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner..."

30

Lenehan

'Two Gallants'

James Joyce

"He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own?"

30

Joseph K.

The Trial (Der Process)

Franz Kafka

"...when you've been in the world for thirty years already and had to make your own way through everything yourself, which has been my lot, then you become hardened to surprises..."

30

John Daniel Edward "Jack" Torrance

The Shining

Stephen King

"... John Torrance, thirty years old, who had once published in Esquire and who had harboured dreams – not at all unreasonable dreams, he felt – of becoming a major American writer..."

30

Orlando

Orlando: A Biography

Virginia Woolf

"when a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short..."

30

Johannes Friedmann

‘Little Herr Friedmann’ ('Der kleine Herr Friedemann')

Thomas Mann

"Well, that’s thirty years gone..."

30

Nick Carraway

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade."