Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian (2005)

19 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
My dear and unfortunate successor:
I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to — ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy. There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. 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
We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.

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

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

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
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
It is a fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us.

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

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 claw.

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

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

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