Elizabeth Kostova Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“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 -
“Recently abandoned women can be complicated.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“These atheist cultures were certainly diligent in preserving the relics of their saints.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“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 -
“I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“...History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“I wasn't brought up to be dazzled by money or fame.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“For me, Dracula has always been associated with travel and beautiful historical places.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments,”
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
“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 -
“In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.”
-- Elizabeth Kostova
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