Eric Macalik

“These visitors remain far removed from the conversations between archaeologists, historians, and government officials concerning Bagan’s legacy. Instead, they arrive intrigued by the cover photo of so many Myanmar guidebooks: a panoramic shot of the sprawling, temple-filled plains of a grand ancient city. To the vast majority of these tourists, Bagan isn’t a complex matrix of preservation, economic growth, and cultural tradition. It isn’t a place to be debated or discussed or analyzed. To many of these tourists, Bagan is simply a place to look around, to take pictures, to buy souvenirs. To them, Bagan is a postcard. This”
― David Bockino, Greetings from Myanmar

“And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden