About Elizabeth Kostova: Elizabeth Johnson Kostova is an American author best known for her debut novel The Historian.
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 ...
When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.
[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. 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 Prote...
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.
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.
It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.
As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
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.
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.
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.
Si tuvieras que elegir entre la cordura, tu vida tal como la recuerdas, antes que la verdadera inestabilidad, ¿qué elegirías como manera adecuada para vivir de un estudioso?
Recently abandoned women can be complicated.
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?
And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?
-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
Faith is simply whatever is real to us.
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 ski...
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.
