Quotes from Elizabeth Kostova

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.

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.

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

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.

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.

Faith is simply whatever is real to us.

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

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.

It was a paradise of learning, and I prayed for eventual admission.

People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is a silent, blank page.

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.)

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.

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

There are people who stick in one's memory much more clearly after a brief acquaintance than others whom one sees day after day after a long period.

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

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.

These are works of history about your century, the twentieth. A fine century-I look forward to the rest of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doesn't every love express itself this way, with the seeds of both its flowering and its ruin in the very first words, the first breath, the first though?

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.