Wayne Trotman

“It also gives life a richness and unpredictability that endows even the simplest undertakings with an air of challenge and uncertainty.”
― Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

“Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully—people still remarked—was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable—all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“stood like this for an hour, maybe two. The train snaked through the desert and steppe at forty or fifty kilometres an hour. Kazakhstan covers an area of 2,724,900 square kilometres, which is bigger than Western Europe. It is the ninth largest country in the world, and the largest one without a coast. And there, by the dusty train window, I started to realise just how big 2,724,900 square kilometres is. Kazakhstan is more than twice the size of the four other Central Asian countries combined. The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, today’s Kazakhstan, accounted for twelve per cent of the total area of the Soviet Union, which was a staggering 22,402,200 square metres. By comparison, Russia is currently 17,075,200 square kilometres. In other words, Kazakhstan alone accounts for more than half the territory lost by Russia in the breakup of the Soviet Union.”
― Erika Fatland, Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan

“The incongruity between their listless apathy on the one hand and their overloaded artillery belts on the other feels both comical and sinister; Turkey is swiftly making the transition from conservative semi-democracy to autarchic security state, and even the most parochial of greenhorn patrolmen is now dressed like the Praetorian Guard.”
― Rebecca Lowe, The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East