Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

I never had the vaguest idea whether any of it had anything to do with me, especially being a sixth grader. When I got older and traveled, I'd read about the history of where I was going. I'd be like, "Oh, history is kind of interesting."

I never feel empty. I travel a lot and I think about other films.

I've traveled the world in one of the best groups ever. I'm 42.

Traveling the world can be an amazing - and even better - a happy experience. You just have to do it the right way.

I've always had one completely nonaltruistic goal, which is to go to every country in the world.

I love history, and I thought I knew history well, but I was shocked by how little I knew about it.

I spent 12 years traveling more than six months a year. I really needed to see the world.

You travel around the world, once you travel around a few times, you're kind of numb to the fact of what you've accomplished until years later.

I was excited to explore and see the world. I'd been traveling since I was 6 months old, so I was never fearful of getting on a plane and going somewhere - even America.

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.

What gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.

I love travel. I love to go spend time in new places. And even though I got horribly sick in Thailand, and it was the sickest I may have ever been in my life, I still loved the trip.

I want your first trip to be with me. I want to show you cities and landscapes and teach you how to look at things in new ways and how to get along in places you don't already know inside out. I want to put some life in you.

My world on the road always ends up feeling really small which is ironic because that's when I'm seeing the most places and meeting the most people!

Traveling is no fool's errand to him who carries his eyes and itinerary along with him.

My first trip to Canada has been great!

to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.

When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.

Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.

We Americans look funny when we're in France because we don't travel, we are fairly un-cultured whereas Europeans go to Africa all the time because it's right there.

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.