Top 100 Elizabeth Kostova Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

53. “Dracula – ” He paused. “Dracula – Vlad Tepes – is still alive.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

54. “I knew people who dreamed all the time about going somewhere else, and they let that ruin their lives. When you are not allowed to do something, it often becomes very important.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

55. “When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

56. “Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

57. “Pushing out through the doors, I experienced that mingled relief and disappointment one feels on departure from a great museum – relief at being returned to the familiar, less intense, more manageable world, and disappointment at that world’s lack of mystery.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

58. “Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

59. “For the first time in all the years I remembered, all the years in which my father had sheltered me from the loneliness of life with no mother, no siblings, no home country, all the years of his being both father and mother – for the first time, I felt like an orphan.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

61. “I wondered again if I might not actually be dead-if this was some terrible version of death, which I had momentarily mistaken for a continuation of life.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

63. “Not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

64. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

65. “They were taking my natural feelings away, so quietly that it could have occurred without my noticing. I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

66. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

67. “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?”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

69. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

70. “I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

72. “Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition?”

— Elizabeth Kostova

73. “We have all, of course, heard the story of the invention of the croissant, the tribute of a Parisian pastry chef to Vienna’s victory over the Ottomans. The croissant, of course, represented the crescent moon of the Ottoman flags, a symbol the West devours with coffee to this very day.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

74. “Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

75. “Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

76. “It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

77. “He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

78. “Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger. For some reason they had decided not to beat me.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

80. “The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

81. “To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

83. “In my mortal life, I saw mainly those texts that the church sanctioned – the gospels and the Orthodox commentary on them, for example. These works were of no use to me, in the end.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

84. “It was strange, I reflected... 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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

85. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

86. “Together we will advance the historian’s work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean blood.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

87. “Then sleep reached her, a sucking undertow, and she went over backward.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

88. “This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did – as we would.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

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

— Elizabeth Kostova

90. “But sometimes a man who is very good thinks, I am very bad, and it – destructs his life, everything. Because he does not believe that he has any right to do something, so he does less and less.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

91. “I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of living closely with my own mind, alone with it while I practiced.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

92. “Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn’t look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line – something limited to the neighbors.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

93. “Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

94. “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.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

95. “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 every day to my apartment. I have a moment now and then – as I peel an orange and take it from kitchen counter to table – when I feel almost a pang of contentment, perhaps at that raw colour.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

96. “There is a final resource to which I’ve resorted when necessary – the imagination. I have done this with judicious care, imagining for my reader only what I already know is very likely, and even then only when an informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context. Where I have been unable to explain events or motives, I have left them unexplained, out of respect for their hidden realities.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

97. “And I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

98. “Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

99. “At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

100. “It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger.”

— Elizabeth Kostova