Elizabeth Kostova > Quotes

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.”
― 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

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

“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

“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

“Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.”
― Elizabeth Kostova

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millenia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“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

“Faith is simply whatever is real to us.”
― 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

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

“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 Swan Thieves

“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

“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

“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, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Swan Thieves

“These are works of history about your century, the twentieth. A fine century-I look forward to the rest of it.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“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, The Historian

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

“Not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it.”
― 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 Historian

“A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“Ich verstehe mit achtzig was ich mit siebzig noch nicht verstehen konnte, naemlich dass man am Ende so gut wie allen vergibt, nur sich selbst nicht.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“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

“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, The Swan Thieves

“Then draw everything. Do a hundred drawings a day,' he said fiercely. 'And remember that it's a hellish life.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Swan Thieves

“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

“Manchmal gibt es kaum etwas Schwierigeres, als zu jemandem zu sprechen, der ueber die Macht des Schweigens verfuegt.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“-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, The Swan Thieves

“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

“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, The Swan Thieves

“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, The Historian