Elizabeth Kostova > Quotes

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”
― Elizabeth Kostovia, The Historian

“You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“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, The Historian

“It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“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, The Historian

“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, The Historian

“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, The Swan Thieves

“Recently abandoned women can be complicated.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Historian

“There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence.”
― 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, The Swan Thieves

“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, La historiadora

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

“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, The Historian

“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, The Historian

“I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“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, The Historian

“...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, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Historian

“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, The Historian

“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, The Swan Thieves

“The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Swan Thieves

“..then you must say to her, ‘Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you...”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Swan Thieves

“I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“Festina Lente (Hurry in slowly)”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“Faith is simply whatever is real to us.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves