Bryan

“After half a day in a place—especially a foreign country—you’ve learned more than from all the books and articles you’ve read.”
― 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

“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

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