“Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.”

The God of Small Things (1997)

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Arundhati Roy 122
Indian novelist, essayist 1961

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“Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.”

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Context: Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.
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before the sun went down,
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“At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all.”

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2
Context: At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.

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