“He was then sixty-two years old, an age by which most men are in the grave or at least occupying a chair in Death's antechamber.”

“In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.”

“Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.”

“Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.”

“All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.”

“How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.”