Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

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

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.

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

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.

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

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.

...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

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

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.

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

Recently abandoned women can be complicated.

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?

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.

Faith is simply whatever is real to us.

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.

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.

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

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.

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

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

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

Festina Lente (Hurry in slowly)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

-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

It was good to walk into a library again it smelled like home.

... I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.

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.

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'.

He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight.