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fffe94f
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We went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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df762b9
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The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I'd expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian, I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope of rich hues and shaggy..
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bulgarians
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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cb895da
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gracefully
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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5039b92
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Dracula --" He paused. "Dracula--Vlad Tepes--is still alive."
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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c0defd6
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I wondered again if I might not actually be dead-if this was some terrible version of death, which I had momentarily mistaken for a continuation of life.
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life
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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f0f82f1
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The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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3b19188
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Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. Since then I have known this moment
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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c171592
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I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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b082ab4
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Ao sairmos para o anoitecer dourado das ruas bizantinas, refleti como era estranho que, mesmo sob as circunstancias mais extraordinarias, durante episodios mais perturbadores da vida, nos lugares mais distantes de casa e de tudo que nos e familiar, possam existir esses momentos de incontestavel alegria.
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inspiration
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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2a70780
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It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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e795326
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you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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f80bfb0
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Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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5adaf0e
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To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.
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life
intriguing
readers
secrets
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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df02a43
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Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition?
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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7960974
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Looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We are all vulnerable.
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history
the-historian
historian
dracula
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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353ef96
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I felt sure...that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either.
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history
the-historian
dracula
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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575e408
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The thing that haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had- apparently- actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the 'large family' dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: h..
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history
truth
history-as-a-guide
vlad-the-impaler
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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2288599
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I felt like an orphan.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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b9ba2ad
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For the first time in all the years I remembered, all the years in which my father had sheltered me from the loneliness of life with no mother, no siblings, no home country, all the years of his being both father and mother - for the first time, I felt like an orphan.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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8d57e01
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I hadn't realized before seeing him how thoroughly alone I'd felt on that rain, headed toward the unknown, headed perhaps toward the larger loneliness of being unable to find my father or even toward the galactic loneliness of losing him forever.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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b18c294
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I flipped through the rest of the pages--when you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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eee8cf2
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nave
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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5a10764
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I knew people who dreamed all the time about going somewhere else, and they let that ruin their lives. When you are not allowed to do something, it often becomes very important.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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af12f77
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History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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8a35bcc
|
The strange thing, you know, is that Stalin openly admired Ivan the Terrible. Two leaders who were willing to crush and kill their own people-to do anything necessary- in order to consolidate their power...Can you imagine a world in which Stalin could live for five hundred years...or perhaps forever?
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ivan-the-terrible
vlad-the-impaler
political-power
stalin
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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d2843a6
|
But sometimes a man who is very good thinks, I am very bad, and it--destructs his life, everything. Because he does not believe that he has any right to do something, so he does less and less.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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afa2224
|
It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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4191786
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I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of living closely with my own mind, alone with it while I practiced.
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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7ead8fd
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Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history.
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Elizabeth Kostova |