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.

As with the Serbian monastery Hilandar,

a monster equal to a saint?

His head! Don’t you see? Dracula went back to Constantinople to get his head!’

She was untouchable, mine but lost to me.

Would you marry a woman who has been marked by hell?’

The past is very useful, but only for what it can teach us about the present.

That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.”