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Forty-Three Years Old - Janice Angstrom
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Nelson Angstrom 22

As they walk up the front steps his feet feel heavy, as if the world has taken on new gravity. He and the kid years ago went through something for which Rabbit has forgiven himself but which he knows the kid never has. A girl called Jill died when Harry’s house burned down, a girl Nelson had come to love like a sister. At least like a sister. But the years have piled on, the surviving have patched things up, and so many more have joined the dead, undone by diseases for which only God is to blame, that it no longer seems so bad, it seems more as if Jill just moved to another town, where the population is growing. Jill would be twenty-eight now. Nelson is twenty-two. Think of all the blame God has to shoulder.

John Updike  ·  Rabbit is Rich

22

Amory Blaine

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I’m years older in experience..."

22

Walter Bidlake

Point Counter Point

Aldous Huxley

"...he was only twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out..."

22

Arthur Seaton

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Alan Sillitoe

"...he knew he could hold his own with anybody; over six-feet tall, just turned twenty-two, and bags of strength to be drawn from somewhere..."

22

Jacob Flanders

Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf

"I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant..."

22

Stephen Dedalus

Ulysses

James Joyce

"I am twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled, twentytwo years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse..."

22

Arthur Norris

Mr Norris Changes Trains

Christopher Isherwood

"Arthur had to grow up; to go to Oxford. His mother had to die..."

22

Stanwood Emery

Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Pasos

"Stanwood Emery age twentytwo occupation student …"

22

Cavaillon

The Vagabond (La Vagabonde)

Collette

"We have run into this tall young man of twenty-two once or twice already..."

22

Edward Ashburnham

The Good Soldier - A Tale of Passion

Ford Maddox Ford

"He was at that time twenty-two and, I believe, almost in pure in mind as Leonora herself. It is odd how a boy can have his virgin intelligence untouched in this world."