144 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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