Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

I've always been blessed, or cursed, some might say, with an insatiable curiosity, a desire to find something out about a people and a place. That's where it all begins.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Ethnology: The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

The job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange and to make the strange familiar,

Human nature fascinates me.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

I am an observant. I like to observe people.

I studied psychology, history, and religion. I was a heady girl, but frankly, I'm glad I studied those subjects because a lot of that has really helped me as an actress.

I love to study people and pick apart what makes a person or character who they are. I never want to get complacent in that.

I grew up curious, and I always wanted to learn about different things.

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens.

Acting is very anthropological for me. It makes me less judgmental.

When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn't that different from other primate species'.

I'm probably, like, the nosiest person you'll ever meet. Not in a rude way, but I like to be in the know.

My mother wanted me to be a reader. She was a reader. Even though she had an 11th-grade education, she was curious about all kinds of things - archeology, anthropology.

The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.

I'm very interested in people, in general.