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

- Elizabeth Kostova

The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at th…

- Elizabeth Kostova

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.

- Elizabeth Kostova

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 endang…

- Elizabeth Kostova

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

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

- 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

The thing that most haunted me that day, however...was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred...For all his attention to my …

- 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