Quotes from Elizabeth Kostova

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.

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

Not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it.

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.

It's a shame for a woman'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 when they happened.

A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming.

In your country you don't care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.

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.

And I always return to the illusion that we are still together, and then -unwillingly- to the knowledge that you have made a hostage of my memory...

That is the beauty of the solid Marxist education you did not have the privilege of receiving. Believe me, you can find labor issues in any topic if you look hard enough.

perhaps when you live your entire life among such scenes, they do not register as beauty but as the world itself—

It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again.

Looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We are all vulnerable.

I felt sure…that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either.

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

History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.

It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, 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.

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded?

I don't think painters have the answers about a painting except the painting itself. Anyway, a painting has to have some kind of mystery to it to make it work.

Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition?

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.

The past is very useful, but only for what if can teach us about the present. The present is the rich thing. But I am very fond of the past.

Another corner was dedicated to alchemy, another to witchcraft, another to philosophy of the most disturbing sort.

I hadn't realized before seeing him how thoroughly alone I'd felt on that rain, headed toward the unknown, headed perhaps toward the larger loneliness of being unable to find my father or even toward the galactic loneliness of losing him forever.