“If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were ten years old.... This almost-brother. This blood-love in everything but name.”

“A daughter, a wife, a grandson,' You could say this place took away all I had. I could easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilization of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up a home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.”

“Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools.”

“All those who love know exactly the limit they're prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.”

“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.”

“But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.”

“A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.”