Quotes from Elizabeth Kostova

Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.

But when you accept an intruder for too long, you invite him back later as a guest.

We went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to.

If my conscience had been a person at that moment, I might have strangled him.

I've retrained myself since childhood into a kind of diligent goodwill toward life. Life and I became friends some years ago - not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home

It was as if she could hear music, where there was no music.

but the first days of loving someone are vivid; you remember them in detail because they represent all the others. They even explain why a particular love doesn't work out.

I preferred solitude anyway; it was the medium in which I had been raised, in which I swam comfortably.

Politicians who talk about purity usually end up deciding who is pure and who is not.

My publishers are wonderful because they have let me write what I wanted to. They're wise enough to know that, with any author who's not simply writing formulas - who's trying to create something new - pressuring them to do something for market purposes almost always backfires. I can't imagine working under those circumstances, actually.

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

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

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 claws.

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.

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

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.

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.

Recently abandoned women can be complicated.

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

The thing that most haunted me that day, however...was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred...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.

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

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.

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.

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