"Belarus went through empire and emerged on the other side.
And now those men from the market, who at last have entered into the whole world, had to be like the others. It meant they had to think about identity. To search for masks. To invent and reconstruct their tradition. To meditate and to question both what is inside and what is outside. Belarus was becoming both a project and a utopia. And maybe even metaphysical."

Ihar Babkou

"Europe continues to be a 'work in progress'; that remains its defining characteristic. The celebration of Communion, Baroque architecture, and coffee with whipped cream all pointed, historically, in the direction of democracy; but Ramadan, minarets and Turkish coffee are not a one-way street to dictatorship. Being a 'Muslim European' can no longer be regarded as a contradiction in terms"

Peter Haffner

"I travel east to harden myself and, to put it not so nicely, to gather inspiration. The East sharpens your senses like a storm. The West, like the sea, softens the edges of whatever it is that's grinding you down. Over a cup of coffee in the West European capitals, we ramble on about the faults of capitalism; in a sweaty, beat-up train to Vladivostok we long in vain for a touch of West European refinement."

Petra Hůlová

"Somewhat spent, Adam looked at the dawn over the lake and said: Do you know, Drago, what we’re really aspiring to? Thinking I did, I looked at him in surprise.
To something as boring as the Netherlands, he said. Would you want to live in such boredom?"

Drago Jančar

"At the funeral there were about twenty people, at the reception a woman from a Baltic emigrant family sat next to me, and next to her sat her husband – an orthodox priest from Polesia – next to him, a female Belarusian, the wife of the deceased, her daughter who doesn’t speak her father’s language, her daughter’s husband from Chile whose parents escaped to Europe from Pinochet, there were also Jews who had emigrated from the USSR during the Brezhnev era, an Armenian, a Ukrainian, a Tatar, multiculturalism in action [...]"

Aljaksandr Lukaschuk

>> One evening, the daughter of the lady in whose house I was staying took me to the theater to see a French show, to my taste a bit flashy, but more than welcome by her. At a moment when there was great commotion on stage (music, half-undressed girls, cries), the performance was suddenly interrupted and the director of the theater walked to the apron, requested silence and announced, “We’ve just learned that the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to the Polish poet Czaslaw Milosz.” The collective emotion—joy, hand clapping, hurrahs—which I participated in, celebrated not only a victory, that of Poland so often enslaved and on the verge of being reborn, and that of a non-captive, free mind.<<

Pierre Pachet

"It is remarkably important that you, being so familiar to the Poles, are also a Lithuanian. In the minute arguments between the two countries, which do not appear to be ending any time soon, your identity is an incentive towards reconciliation. It gives us Lithuanians satisfaction to know that you, one of the most prominent 20th century Polish cultural figures, knew the Lithuanian language, recognized our culture and highlighted its archaism many times in your essays, and undermined the strength of the stereotype that Lithuanians are uneducated people. I thank you for being a Lithuanian who is such a remarkable Pole."

Donatas Petrošius

"This is the protest of  the >>whole person<< [...] who is fundamentally more complex than ideological doctrines, and more contradictory than any professed political position. The latter is impossible without phrases and slogans, which we mutter in our sleep - no less that it requires us to breathe more rapidly when we hear separate names, titles, epithets. The >>whole person<< is an undesirable motif for any doctrinaire worldview or system because it fails to submit to classification, emerges from any kind of drawer, calls into question categorical assertions [...]"

Ostap Slyvynsky

"The longer I march across the pages of Czesław Miłosz’s biographical essay and the deeper I delve (sometimes floundering with effort, sometimes diving without restraints) in the heterogeneous (in places soft, in places as rough as sandpaper) texture of Native Realm, the faster the kaleidoscope
of images and thoughts, the veritable merry-go-round of stimuli and impressions, turns in front of my eyes and the greater the speed with which the planets of opinion spin around the orbit of attention held together by the gravitational force of this glowing story."

Igor Stokfiszewski