Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love.

It as an argument between the world of emotion versus the world of the intellect. It's the idea that you can suppress a person's mind and a person's experiences, mentally, psychologically and intellectually, but you can't completely quiet them to the point of dormancy and the emotionally life a person. You still have the heart and what the heart remembers and what the heart experiences. And even that isn't important that that comes across.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

"People's minds are trained largely at the expense of their hearts." This is not so; it is only that there are more educable minds than there are educable hearts.

I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.

Keep in mind that people change, but the past doesn't.

The mind scolds the heart, which makes excuses and goes its own way.

I find it dull when my heart meets my mind

The mind may be exhausted, but the language of the heart is inexhaustible.

So I step into the future, as bravely as I'm able, with my heart longing for a time I'll never see again.

Don't look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad?)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that's why we have tat swivel joint in our necks.

If you worry about the ones you missed, you are going to keep missing them.

Nothing that I can encounter today can be as bad as what is behind me. There are small things that used to upset me, but now I just think: Who cares?

Let your broken heart create an open heart

If you have your mind in the right direction, and your heart is full of the right kind of stuff, you'll succeed and you'll triumph over adversity, over really anything.

I had lost my mind and fallen into my heart.

Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.

You don't get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully.

There's no use in weeping, Though we are condemned to part: There's such a thing as keeping, A remembrance in one's heart.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

I think every time you get your heart broken, there's a little piece of it that chips away, and I don't think you ever get that piece back. But I think you're able to bandage it with time and with new people and other things that make you happy.

May I strike my heart's keys clearly, and may none fail because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings. May the tears that stream down my face make me more radiant: may my hidden weeping bloom.... How we waste our afflictions!... [T]hey're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only a season—: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

That strange, twisted, torn love. That conflict between what your heart knows is right and what your mind is told is right.