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Quote by Craig Hodges

“After a year or two, the long term expats won’t see the beggars the same way. After a year or two, the cheeky young monks won’t make them smile. After a year or two, the newest restaurant opening won’t pull them in. To preserve they will withdraw and settle. They will come to accept the limits of it all. The hype won’t bother them. The promise won’t motivate them. They will have accepted their odd expat life, their awkward place in the chimera that is Myanmar today.”

Quote by Craig Hodges

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Craig Hodges

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“ထုတ်ဝေရေးလောကမှာတော့ စိစစ်ရေးရုပ်သိမ်းလိုက်တဲ့အခါ အများကြီးပြောင်းလဲသွားတယ်။ ဒါပေမယ့် လာဘ်စားတဲ့ကိစ္စ၊ ခြစားတဲ့ကိစ္စတွေ ရေးရင်တော့ စိတ်မချရသေးဘူးလို့ ခံစားကြတယ်။ ယဉ်ကျေးမှုနဲ့ ဘာသာရေးကိစ္စမှာလဲ ဒီအတိုင်းပါပဲ။ ထိလို့မရသေးဘူး။ ပန်ဒိုရာ”

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Book:Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition
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“Life was good until the purges came. After that, there was nothing to do except flee into the jungle, high up, where it was so thick only wild things grew. When the purges stopped Black Spot and his friends and cousin went quietly to the town of Nyang Shwe, where they were not known. They procured black-market identity cards of dead people with good reputations. After that they lived two ways: in the open life of the dead, and in the hidden life of the living.”

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“The ambition was neither to know the Sino-Burmese as a totalizable phenomenon nor to produce uncontestable knowledge. As Hannah Arendt has stated, this pursuit of understanding is an unending activity that attempts to activate the multiple meanings of things and these meanings are the unfolding of significance.”

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Book:Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese
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“Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, "I'm sorry, good buddy, you've written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner"? The idea has some validity, but I don't think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I'm looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than "This sucks." (Although most of us know that "I think this has a few problems" actually means "This sucks," don't we?)”

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Book:On writing: a memoir of the craft
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“အခုဆိုရင် ဂျာနယ်တွေ ၃၀၀ လောက်ရှိနေပြီ။ အများစုက စီးပွားရေး၊ ကျန်းမာရေးပဲ။ အတွေးအခေါ်ပါတာ မများဘူး။ သဘောထားအမြင် ဖော်ပြတာနည်းတယ်။ မြန်မာပြည်မျာ စိစစ်ရေးမရှိတော့ဘူးဆိုပေမယ့် အစစ်အမှန်လွတ်လပ်မှု မရှိသေးဘူး။ အချက်အလက်တွေ တင်ပြတာမျိုးပဲ ရှိသေးတယ်။ ဒါက အစိုးရကြောင့်မဟုတ်၊ စာရေးသူတွေကိုယ်တိုင် ဦးနှောက်ထဲမှာ ထိန်းချုပ်မှုတွေ ဝေဝဲနေဆဲမို့ပါပဲ။”

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“A whole society composed of the unknown within them! They all sense that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws--neither their religion nor their morality is in any way suited to the needs of the present. For a 100 years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories. They know exactly how many ounces of powder to kill a man but they don't know how to pray to God, they don't even know how to be happy for a single contented hour.”

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“And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of all— the sound of a green trolley car going around a comer— a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire . . .”

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“They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.”

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Book:Dandelion Wine
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