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Thirty Years Old - Johannes Friedmann
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Johannes Friedmann 30

On his thirtieth birthday, a fine warm June day, he was sitting after lunch in the grey tent in the garden, leaning against a new soft neck-rest which Henriette had made for him, with a good cigar in his mouth and a good book in his hand. Now and then he would put the book aside, listen to the contented twittering of the sparrows in the old walnut tree and look at the neat gravel drive that led up to the house and at the lawn with its bright flower-beds.

Little Herr Friedmann was clean-shaven, and his face had scarcely changed at all except for a slight sharpening of his features. He wore his soft light brown hair smoothly parted on one side.

Once, lowering the book right into his lap, he gazed up at the clear blue sky and said to himself: ‘Well, that’s thirty years gone. And now I suppose there will be another ten or perhaps twenty, God knows. They will come upon me silently and pass by without any commotion, as the others have done, and I look forward to them with peace of mind.

Thomas Mann  ·  ‘Little Herr Friedmann’ ('Der kleine Herr Friedemann') (Trans. David Luke)

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Richard Tull

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Martin Amis

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

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Hamlet

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William Shakespeare

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

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Septimus Warren Smith

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Virginia Woolf

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

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Tom Buchanan

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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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?"

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Joseph K.

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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..."

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John Daniel Edward "Jack" Torrance

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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..."

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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..."

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Antoine Roquentin

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Jean-Paul Sartre

"Shall I go and play croquet with the pensioners in the Luxembourg Gardens? At the age of thirty! I feel sorry for myself...."

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Nick Carraway

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

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