Elisabeth Kostova

I found we could speak to each other freely—in which of our languages I am no longer sure—and I could read the world and perhaps all my own future in the darkness of her eyes, with their thick lashes and the delicate Asiatic fold at the inner corner.

You are descended from Vlad Dracula.’

“If it hadn’t been so gruesome, I would have smiled. The Wallachian prince was formidably creative as well as destructive, an enemy clever in the extreme. A second later I realized that I’d just thought of him in present tense.