Bryan

“disappeared beneath Soviet avenues of cracked concrete; how variety – medieval stone foundations, baroque seminarium doors, classical columns, Prussian red brick walls, and delicate shop windows – had vanished behind spectacular monotony; how churches and pastry shops, farmers’ markets, tobacconists, a university and schools and law courts gave way to numbered apartment blocks.”
― Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe

“I always tell travel writing students to use these early hours to explore, because one’s surroundings—the colorful drinks, the melodic sirens, the sweet-and-foul smells—will not be as clear or as sharp in a few days. At the start, everything stands out as if in high definition, especially, strangely, if you’re groggy from jet lag or insomnia.”
― Thomas Swick, The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them

“No family ever put an airport under its Christmas tree.”
― Thomas Swick, The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them

“But then there were other days, days when I would, quite unexpectedly, meet someone who saw the past not as a burden but as a forgotten story, now due to be retold; there were days when I would find an old house, or old church, or something unexpected like the cemetery in L’viv, which suddenly revealed the secret history of a place or a nation. That was part of what I was looking for: evidence that things of beauty had survived war, communism, and Russification; proof that difference and variety can outlast an imposed homogeneity; testimony, in fact, that people can survive any attempt to uproot them.”
― Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe