I wasn’t brought up to be dazzled by money or fame.
For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.
He can’t really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them.
The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That’s all you need.
Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened.
Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.
It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.
He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker’s novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.
It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.
In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don’t know.
There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence.
And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?
Faith is simply whatever is real to us.
I’ve always been interested in foreign relations. It’s my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.
I’ve read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn’t, since hers was simply a companion to my own.
The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.
If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.
We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.
What comes to your mind when you think of the word Transylvania, if you ponder it at all? What comes to my mind are mountains of savage beauty, ancient castles, werewolves, and witches – a land of magical obscurity. How, in short, am I to believe I will still be in Europe, on entering such a realm? I shall let you know if it’s Europe or fairyland, when I get there. First, Snagov – I set out tomorrow.