Elizabeth Kostova Quotes & Sayings

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

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new? — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. — Elizabeth Kostova

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

Dracula - " He paused. "Dracula - Vlad Tepes - is still alive. — Elizabeth Kostova

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

Then draw everything. Do a hundred drawings a day,' he said fiercely. 'And remember that it's a hellish life. — Elizabeth Kostova

She ate like a polite wolf. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

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

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is. Why should you not use your great mind in service of what is perfectible? I ask you, my friend, to join me of your own accord in my research. If you do so, you will save yourself great anguish, and you will save me considerable trouble. Together we will advance the historian's work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean with blood. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face. — Elizabeth Kostova

We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

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

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

If my conscience had been a person at that moment, I might have strangled him. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

Recently abandoned women can be complicated. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

These are works of history about your century, the twentieth. A fine century-I look forward to the rest of it. — Elizabeth Kostova

..then you must say to her, 'Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you... — Elizabeth Kostova

I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one. — Elizabeth Kostova

He said there is a place in Gaul, the oldest church in their part of the world, where some of the Latin monks have outwitted death by secret means. He offered to sell me their secrets, which he has inscribed in a book."
The abbot shudders. "God preserve us from such heresies," he says hastily. "I am certain, my son, that you refused this temptation."
Dracula smiles. "You know I am fond of books. — Elizabeth Kostova

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men. — Elizabeth Kostova

I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years. — Elizabeth Kostova

Faith is simply whatever is real to us. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality. — Elizabeth Kostova

What comes to your mind when you think of the word Transylvania, if you ponder it at all? What comes to my mind are mountains of savage beauty, ancient castles, werewolves, and witches - a land of magical obscurity. How, in short, am I to believe I will still be in Europe, on entering such a realm? I shall let you know if it's Europe or fairyland, when I get there. First, Snagov - I set out tomorrow. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book. — Elizabeth Kostova

There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence. — Elizabeth Kostova

As an adult I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable itself - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone. — Elizabeth Kostova

These atheist cultures were certainly diligent in preserving the relics of their saints. — Elizabeth Kostova

My publishers are wonderful because they have let me write what I wanted to. They're wise enough to know that, with any author who's not simply writing formulas - who's trying to create something new - pressuring them to do something for market purposes almost always backfires. I can't imagine working under those circumstances, actually. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind. — Elizabeth Kostova

I preferred solitude anyway; it was the medium in which I had been raised, in which I swam comfortably. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

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

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

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded? — Elizabeth Kostova

Strangers are strange to each other. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn't look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line
something limited to the neighbors. — Elizabeth Kostova

I remembered some of what I'd read in the past: the small group of the original Impressionists, including one woman-Berthe Morisot- who'd first banded together in 1874 to exhibit works in a style that the Paris Salon found too experimental for inclusion. We postmoderns take them for granted, or disdain them, or love them too easily. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

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

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

It's a shame for women'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 whenever they occurred. (Our teachers deplored this and added extra units about social history and protest movements, but that was still the message of the books.) — Elizabeth Kostova

when the sun rose at the quarry it turned the world lavender and gold. After — Elizabeth Kostova

I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist. — Elizabeth Kostova

For me, Dracula has always been associated with travel and beautiful historical places. — Elizabeth Kostova

The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I'd expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian,
I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were
handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied
from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope
of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or
aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble
foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries. — Elizabeth Kostova

The thing that most haunted me that day, however ... was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred ... For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth - really seen it - you can't look away. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

-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

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming. — Elizabeth Kostova

It was a paradise of learning, and I prayed for eventual admission. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

One evening I let a stranger buy me a round of a local specialty called, whimsically, amnesia ... — Elizabeth Kostova

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination. — Elizabeth Kostova

Marriages are like certain books, a story where you turn the last page and you think it's over and then there's an epilogue, and after that you're inclined to go on wondering about the characters or imagining that their lives continue without you, dear reader. Until you forget most of that book, you're stuck puzzling over what happened to them after you closed it. — Elizabeth Kostova

In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

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

Not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

I wasn't brought up to be dazzled by money or fame. — Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

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