Between East and West Quotes

“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

“Sometimes, when you go on foot there, when you walk in the woods near the old pagan temples, you feel something very strong. It is like the energy you feel in a church, or the energy you feel when a boy and a girl are in love and touch hands for the first time.”
― Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe

“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

“A traveler can meet a man born in Poland, brought up in the Soviet Union, who now lives in Belarus – and he has never left his village.”
― Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe

“In the former Soviet Union in the years following 1989, nationalism was still popularly believed to be progressive; nationalist leaders were still believed, at least in the beginning, to speak for the many people whose voices had been suppressed in the past.”
― Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe