Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.

It's interesting because I haven't done a lot of period work in the past, but I always wanted to because I'm interested in history.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

I write to learn the flow of history.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History after all is the true poetry.