Quotes from Kapka Kassabova

What if love is made and nothing else? asked Narcissus, leaning over the green iris of water. Nothing else, cried Echo from the green cochlea of the woods. And they were both right. And they were both lonely.

People die crossing borders, and sometimes just being near them. The lucky ones are reborn on the other side.

I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer. But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other place and people, if you don't even know where you come from?

tango is art, not sex. Yes, it is art made with your body and someone else's. But not sex.

Tango is not just a dance. It's our human condition. To everyone who loves tango, it's what art is to the artist. A way to connect past and future. But you already know this my dear...

if the mixing of peoples was the order of empires and the 'unmixing of peoples' the order of nation-states, what's on the horizon?

It's funny,' Rado says, 'I can only be Bulgarian when I'm in France. Here, I'm semi-French. Everything is funny and bizarre, and I laugh like someone watching a Beckett play. Except I am a Frenchman with Bulgarian memories. […] But I'll never be one of them. Ah, the filthy French!

Not all dreams get broken. We all need dreams.'...

You are like tango music itself, Kapka.' Julio says, catching his breath. 'You're the universal woman- wherever you go, you will always be a local and a stranger at the same time.

Traveling around the country where you grew up , lost some of your virginity and a few of your illusions, acquired some lasting neuroses, and then left in a hateful mood, is a slightly schizoid experience. You are at once an outsider to the present and an insider of the past. Or perhaps the other way round.

I left Bulgaria when I was a seventeen-year-old East European, and I am now, by all appearances, a 32-year-old 'global soul'. But everybody needs a borrowed 'us' from time to time, even a global soul. And after half a lifetime and several other countries, the Bulgarian 'us' is still the only honest one I have.

But get this: you're free. Freedom is the greatest gift to the artist. Don't waste it. Go to Buenos Aires. Eat some steak. Get a fresh perspective on things.

Something must be done!' 'It's because you don't live here,' Blago snorted. 'You still believe in justice.

communism was in a rush, it had no time for bourgeois things like the past or the environment.

was initially happy, then with the onset of consciousness unhappy, then with the advent of adolescence wretchedly miserable, and finally, in the last throws of my domestic incarceration, convinced I was born in the wrong place and had to escape at all cost. In other words, an ordinary childhood followed by an ordinary adolescence,

I was initially happy, then with the onset of consciousness unhappy, then with the advent of adolescence wretchedly miserable, and finally, in the last throws of my domestic incarceration, convinced I was born in the wrong place and had to escape at all cost. In other words, an ordinary childhood followed by an ordinary adolescence,

And as if blowing it up, flooding it, and keeping it behind the klyon wasn't enough, State Security special forces patrolled the area until 1989. Some locals say there was an additional 'live fence' of thousands of vipers specially bred for this purpose by Uzbeks along the southern Black Sea, under something called decree number 56. Why Uzbeks? Why vipers? Did decree 56 read: 'Let us fulfil the five-year snake plan in one year'?

secret services arrived, I was fed up. I said, Enough already! I want my life back!

Ordinary girls surrender to circumstance, and eventually that becomes the sum of their life. But the universal woman makes her own way.

The money came in bundles tied with elastic bands, in exchange for the promise of a lorry ride across the border. In many cases, people were dumped off before they even reached the border, and so they were back to square one, back in Turkey, back in Ali's Café, but this time without money. It was groundhog day, a Sisyphean sentence – to endlessly go up and down the airless corridor that never changed, though everything else changed. And never to arrive.

If innocence is believing the world is a safe and just place. That summer I lost mine.

If Lyudmila could uncover Bastet, the two of them would unite and rule not just a small Soviet satellite, not just the Children of the World, not just ancient Egypt, but – well, the whole Cosmos.

Read between the lines: she healed killers of their guilt.

I managed to convince myself that I'd left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from? they ask. Does it matter? I answer. But it does.