Top 82 Elizabeth Kostova Quotes
#1. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
Elizabeth Kostova
#3. I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me'.
Elizabeth Kostova
#4. The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.
Elizabeth Kostova
#7. Then draw everything. Do a hundred drawings a day,' he said fiercely. 'And remember that it's a hellish life.
Elizabeth Kostova
#8. Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment.
Elizabeth Kostova
#9. I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.
Elizabeth Kostova
#10. Even someone you've inhabited rooms with, and seen naked everyday, seen sitting on the toilet through a half-opened door, can fade out after a while and become an outline.
Elizabeth Kostova
#11. No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.
Elizabeth Kostova
#12. Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.
Elizabeth Kostova
#13. In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then
ruins more than that, if you're not careful.
Elizabeth Kostova
#14. I don't think painters have the answers about a painting except the painting itself. Anyway, a painting has to have some kind of mystery to it to make it work.
Elizabeth Kostova
#15. In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word.
Elizabeth Kostova
#16. -Do you think artists are supposed to be happy?
-Everyone is supposed to be. -I said staunchly,and I knew that I was indeed an idiot and that was my destiny and I didn't mind it
Elizabeth Kostova
#18. What will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?
Elizabeth Kostova
#19. I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.
Elizabeth Kostova
#20. As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.
Elizabeth Kostova
#21. He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude, the person for whom I'd given up my old self.
Elizabeth Kostova
#23. I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
Elizabeth Kostova
#24. And why should I do such a thing- tell you something that can only dismay you? Well, that is the nature of love: it is brutal in its demands.
Elizabeth Kostova
#25. There are people who stick in one's memory much more clearly after a brief acquaintance than others whom one sees day after day after a long period.
Elizabeth Kostova
#26. And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?
Elizabeth Kostova
#27. Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened.
Elizabeth Kostova
#28. My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.
Elizabeth Kostova
#29. History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.
Elizabeth Kostova
#30. He can't really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them.
Elizabeth Kostova
#31. I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages ... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.
Elizabeth Kostova
#32. I preferred solitude anyway; it was the medium in which I had been raised, in which I swam comfortably.
Elizabeth Kostova
#33. when the sun rose at the quarry it turned the world lavender and gold. After
Elizabeth Kostova
#34. It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.
Elizabeth Kostova
#35. We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.
Elizabeth Kostova
#37. One evening I let a stranger buy me a round of a local specialty called, whimsically, amnesia ...
Elizabeth Kostova
#38. You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
Elizabeth Kostova
#39. In my mortal life, I saw mainly those texts that the church sanctioned
the gospels and the Orthodox commentary on them, for example. These works were of no use to me, in the end.
Elizabeth Kostova
#40. Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over.
Elizabeth Kostova
#41. These atheist cultures were certainly diligent in preserving the relics of their saints.
Elizabeth Kostova
#42. In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.
Elizabeth Kostova
#43. I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality.
Elizabeth Kostova
#44. If my conscience had been a person at that moment, I might have strangled him.
Elizabeth Kostova
#45. It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.
Elizabeth Kostova
#46. ..then you must say to her, 'Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you...
Elizabeth Kostova
#47. There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence.
Elizabeth Kostova
#48. I wondered again if I might not actually be dead-if this was some terrible version of death, which I had momentarily mistaken for a continuation of life.
Elizabeth Kostova
#49. Doesn't every love express itself this way, with the seeds of both its flowering and its ruin in the very first words, the first breath, the first though?
Elizabeth Kostova
#50. Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments,
Elizabeth Kostova
#51. It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.
Elizabeth Kostova
#52. I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.
Elizabeth Kostova
#53. It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.
Elizabeth Kostova
#54. The past is very useful, but only for what if can teach us about the present. The present is the rich thing. But I am very fond of the past.
Elizabeth Kostova
#56. I've retrained myself since childhood into a kind of diligent goodwill toward life. Life and I became friends some years ago - not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home
Elizabeth Kostova
#57. I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.
Elizabeth Kostova
#58. It was a paradise of learning, and I prayed for eventual admission.
Elizabeth Kostova
#59. Bulgarians eat tarator every single day in summer. They think of it as salad although we'd call it a soup. You can make it as thick or thin as you like depending on how much water you add. It's very practical in summer because yogurt cools the body faster than water, but the water hydrates you.
Elizabeth Kostova
#60. The station was crowded by the time the express pulled up. I felt then, as I do now, that there is no joy like the arrival of a train [ ... ] particularly a European train that will carry you south.
Elizabeth Kostova
#61. I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.
Elizabeth Kostova
#62. For me, Dracula has always been associated with travel and beautiful historical places.
Elizabeth Kostova
#63. These are works of history about your century, the twentieth. A fine century-I look forward to the rest of it.
Elizabeth Kostova
#64. We couldn't be sure of anything except the power of love ... and we are under no requirement to believe in a particular source of that love as long as we could keep giving and receiving some in our own lives.
Elizabeth Kostova
#66. For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.
Elizabeth Kostova
#68. This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.
Elizabeth Kostova
#69. He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker's novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.
Elizabeth Kostova
#70. If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.
Elizabeth Kostova
#71. A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming.
Elizabeth Kostova
#72. It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.
Elizabeth Kostova
#73. Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger. For some reason they had decided not to beat me.
Elizabeth Kostova
#74. This time I felt my own face redden. Talking with this woman was like sitting still for a series of slaps, delivered arhythmically so you couldn't know when the next one was coming.
Elizabeth Kostova
#75. I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.
Elizabeth Kostova
#76. Dracula - " He paused. "Dracula - Vlad Tepes - is still alive.
Elizabeth Kostova
#77. I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own.
Elizabeth Kostova
#78. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
Elizabeth Kostova
#79. When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
Elizabeth Kostova
#80. That is the beauty of the solid Marxist education you did not have the privilege of receiving. Believe me, you can find labor issues in any topic if you look hard enough.
Elizabeth Kostova
#81. People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is a silent, blank page.
Elizabeth Kostova
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