Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

As soon as you start acting in an accent, you're sort of out of your comfort zone. Maybe people start getting used to accents after a long period of time. But as soon as you do that, it's not so much as capturing the sound of the way other people speak, it's being able to actually be and move around in the sound.

To learn a new language is, therefore, always a sort of spiritual adventure; it is like a journey of discovery in which we find a new world.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

A song, you know, you've got a tempo. You know,you've got something that is moving swiftly. You can't stop it, you know? Andit's designed to move swiftly from, you know, mouth to mouth, heart to heart,where a poem really speaks to something that has no time and that is - it's acompletely different perception.

Aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy and use it to explore our world? Aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations, in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and beauty of nature?

There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart. One sound comes from a chamber orchestra, the other from the beating of the heart's chamber. One comes from an instrument of graphite and wood, the other from an organ of flesh and blood. This loftier music I speak of tonight is more pleasing than the notes of the most gifted composers, more moving than a marching band, more harmonious than a thousand voices joined in hymn and more powerful than all the world's percussion instruments combined. That sweet sound of love.

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

My job, as an actor, is to entertain people. My contribution to society is to be a respite from everyday life. People go home and watch television or they go to the movies, and they get to escape their reality. But if I can do entertainment that also maybe can educate people, educate myself, move people's hearts and minds, in some way, and bring light to some injustice, that's when entertainment is at its best. And if somebody wants to get more involved in a socially active way, that's when you've done the thing that I've always wanted to be a part of.

The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.

She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

You've got to bring the emotion, and you have to understand that you can't touch other people if you're not touched. You can't move other people if you're not moved. So if you're just giving some frickin talk you've memorized over and over again, you're going to have a flat affect. If you've just got a bunch of visuals on the screen that are leading your talk, hang up your shoes and get the hell out of there.

For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

An intellectual, heartless man never becomes an inspired man. It is always the heart that speaks in the man of love; it discovers a greater instrument than intellect can give you, the instrument of inspiration.

Is it not possible to look beyond the canes, the wheelchairs, the braces, and the crutches into the hearts of the people who have need of these aids? They are human beings and want only to be treated as ordinary people. They may appear different, move awkwardly, and speak haltingly, but they have the same feelings. ... They want to be loved for what they are inside, without any prejudice for their impairment. Can there not be more tolerance for differences-differences in capacity, differences in body and in mind?

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn't invite reflection as much as the printed page.

I just want to fill the hearts and minds of the people who listen to my music

I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.

The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you've ever written - or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart . . . should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.

Sometimes our thoughts turn back toward a corner in a forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard powdered with flowers, seen but a single time on some happy day, yet remaining in our hearts and leaving in soul and body an unappeased desire which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that we have just rubbed elbows with happiness.

The ordinary is ultimately what moves us most deeply. It's what touches us, and it's what we most recognize, in great moments of art.