- Riad Hassan: For 14 years I was "missing in action". The Red Cross visited us during the first year and I could send a letter to my family. After that, they transferred me to another POW camp where I was deprived of everything.
- Abbas Fahdel: [voice-over] The past, with its overwhelming splendour and its scents of paradise lost, is too painful for Iraqis to bear. I recall my father reciting the poet Al-Rissafi: "We are not masters of our miserable present / On men of a foregone age / The face of time once smiled / But on seeing us, it darkened."
- Abbas Fahdel: [voice-over] This man seems so familiar. He resembles my old history teacher, Mr Nima. But it must be a hallucination, because I was told he was dead. I'm already starting to see ghosts.
- Mohamed Abdel-Kader: These last ten years, we've really had to pull our sleeves up to rebuild what was destroyed. Thank God, we survived.
- Mohamed Abdel-Kader: You see us smiling, but we've been through some difficult times. We were bombed for two months.
- Abbas Fahdel: [voice-over] I can't wait to meet my childhood friends. Have they survived? The only one I have news of is Mohamed. He wrote to me: "Come and film us. You'll see how photogenic we've become with all these scars of waste chiseled onto our faces by 20 years of war and 12 years of embargo."
- Abbas Fahdel: [voice-over] I remember this bridge, I recall this street, these buildings. And yet, nothing resembles the memories I have kept of them. Everything is so run-down.
- [last lines]
- Abbas Fahdel: [voice-over] I found my last friend. If I were to die now, I would do so in peace. I have finally retied the threads of my history.