Then sleep reached her, a sucking undertow, and she went over backward.
Another corner was dedicated to alchemy, another to witchcraft, another to philosophy of the most disturbing sort.
Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment.
They were taking my natural feelings away, so quietly that it could have occurred without my noticing. I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next.
With effort, I brought my natural self-discipline to bear on each day, and each day calmed me further.
Dracula – ” He paused. “Dracula – Vlad Tepes – is still alive.
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.
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.
And I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.
I flipped through the rest of the pages – when you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.
When you are not allowed to do something, it often becomes very important.
History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.
We have all, of course, heard the story of the invention of the croissant, the tribute of a Parisian pastry chef to Vienna’s victory over the Ottomans. The croissant, of course, represented the crescent moon of the Ottoman flags, a symbol the West devours with coffee to this very day.
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.
Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn’t look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line – something limited to the neighbors.
I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.
Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.
This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did – as we would.
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.