Historian Elizabeth Kostova Quotes & Sayings

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

People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We lie with our faces because that's what we've been taught to do since early childhood. "Don't make that face," our parents growl when we honestly react to the food placed in front of us. "At least look happy when your cousins stop by," they instruct, and you learn to force a smile. Our parents - and society - are, in essence, telling us to hide, deceive, and lie with our faces for the sake of social harmony. So it is no surprise that we tend to get pretty good at it, so good, in fact, that when we put on a happy face at a family gathering, we might look as if we love our in-laws when, in reality, we are fantasizing about how to hasten their departure. — Joe Navarro

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society. — Lewis Mumford

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

Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 blockbuster, The Historian, — Deborah Harkness

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak. — Paul Fry

Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations. — Jeanette Winterson

When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don't. — Nicolas Chamfort

Those who work standing ... carpenters, sawyers, carvers, blacksmiths, masons ... are liable to varicose veins ... [because] the strain on the muscles is such that the circulation of the blood is retarded. Standing even for a short time proves exhausting compared with walking and running though it be for a long time ... Nature delights and is restored by alternating and varied actions. — Bernardino Ramazzini

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

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

People like you don't come to us; they just feel frustrated by life, like they're supposed to be something more than they are, but they can never break through. — Brent Weeks

Little praying is a kind of make believe, a salve for the conscience, a farce and a delusion. — Edward McKendree Bounds

For a while' in Maycomb meant anything from three days to thirty years. — Harper Lee

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

What's your favorite color?" he whispered against my skin as though he were asking a highly intimate question. "Blue." "Like the ocean or the sky?" "Like your eyes." He turned me — Alyssa Rose Ivy

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

I took the role of Rochelle in 'Everybody Hates Chris,' and that was it. I was going to play mother roles all the time. Once you do one mother role, it's always a trickle down effect. — Tichina Arnold

The American fans would love to see me fight anybody. — Floyd Mayweather Jr.

To see the Law by Christ fulfilled,
And hear His pardoning voice
Changes a slave into a child,
And duty into choice. — William Cowper

I definitely I prefer to sing in the car. I don't sing in the shower, maybe its because that's the one time I don't need to talk to anyone so I should just shut up, otherwise I'm just, you know, jibber jabber. — Haley Reinhart