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 B...
Festina Lente (Hurry in slowly)
I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
She ate like a polite wolf.
You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.
Dracula — He paused. Dracula—Vlad Tepes—is still alive.
But when you accept an intruder for too long, you invite him back later as a guest.
I felt like an orphan.
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 co...
In your country you don't care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.
History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.
Der Glaube ist das, was fuer uns real ist.
This time I felt my own face redden. Talking with this woman was like sitting still for a series of slaps, delivered arhythmically so you couldn't know when the next one was coming.
You handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
Akimbo,
My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.
It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war...
As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably...
People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It’s true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is silent, a blank page.