“Fasal liked to fight; Jiaan was good at planning. Together, Jiaan thought sourly, they almost made a whole officer. And if you added Jiaan's eighteen years to Fasal's seventeen, you had someone old enough to command an army as well.”

“Coordinating the retreat was important too, so important that Jiaan had assigned Aram as Fasal's assistant, to be sure he didn't overlook anything important. Like the fact that they were supposed to retreat.”

“Bein friends is like being soldiers in the army. You live together, you fight together; you die together.”

“I got almost eighteen years with you. The best eighteen years of my life.”

“Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?”

“You can't tell a seventeen-year-old anything. They think they're immortal. They don't listen. Seventeen-year-olds have to see it for themselves.”