Top 100 Elizabeth Kostova Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

2. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

4. “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

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

11. “It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

12. “Recently abandoned women can be complicated.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

13. “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

14. “I’ve read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn’t, since hers was simply a companion to my own.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

15. “I love to cook and I’ve cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

16. “And once you’ve seen that truth – really seen it – you can’t look away.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

18. “I’ve noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

20. “Manchmal gibt es kaum etwas Schwierigeres, als zu jemandem zu sprechen, der ueber die Macht des Schweigens verfuegt.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

21. “I wasn’t brought up to be dazzled by money or fame.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

23. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

24. “Bulgarians eat tarator every single day in summer. They think of it as salad although we’d call it a soup. You can make it as thick or thin as you like depending on how much water you add. It’s very practical in summer because yogurt cools the body faster than water, but the water hydrates you.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

26. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

30. “In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don’t know.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

33. “He can’t really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

34. “In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

35. “The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

36. “I think it’s important to recognise that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

37. “In your country you don’t care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

38. “I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you’ve seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind’s eye?”

— Elizabeth Kostova

39. “Faith is simply whatever is real to us.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

40. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

41. “Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

42. “I remembered some of what I’d read in the past: the small group of the original Impressionists, including one woman-Berthe Morisot- who’d first banded together in 1874 to exhibit works in a style that the Paris Salon found too experimental for inclusion. We postmoderns take them for granted, or disdain them, or love them too easily.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

43. “I flipped through the rest of the pages – when you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

44. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

45. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

46. “I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It’s the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me’.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

47. “No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don’t see the point in doing that.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

48. “I would not allow anyone into the center of myself; I would make myself a place to go, deep inside, no matter what happened.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

49. “He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

50. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova