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1 " Ao sairmos para o anoitecer dourado das ruas bizantinas, refleti como era estranho que, mesmo sob as circunstâncias mais extraordinárias, durante episódios mais perturbadores da vida, nos lugares mais distantes de casa e de tudo que nos é familiar, possam existir esses momentos de incontestável alegria. "
― Elizabeth Kostova , The Historian
2 " When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation. "
3 " You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book. "
4 " Recently abandoned women can be complicated. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
8 " ... I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad. "
9 " To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history. "
10 " 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. "
11 " It touched me to be trusted with something terrible. "
12 " 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. "
13 " As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination. "
14 " It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. "
15 " The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime. "
16 " 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 historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth - really seen it - you can't look away. "
17 " Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened. "
18 " 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. "
19 " I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist. "
20 " As an adult I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable itself - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone. "
