“for years now there had been no country here but the war.”

“Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war.”

“Countries rush to war thinking it is the quickest, easiest solution to conflict, only to find themselves still entrenched years later, suffering more losses than they expected and asking themselves, bewildered, "How did we get here?" There is no "winning" a war.”

“Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.”

“Houses, trees and fields of flax once flourished here. Summers had been blue with flowers. Now it was a shallow sea of stinking grey from end to end. And this is where you fought the war.”

“Has there ever been a country that, once colonized, avoided civil war?”