“It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.”

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

“The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.”

“Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.”

“Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?”