Best 36 quotes of Stacy Schiff on MyQuotes

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.

Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.

Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on “the poetic path.” She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: “Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said ‘Verochka.’ It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered.

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.

Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.

Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night.

Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men's dreams.

For three months of the year they could not be certain what year they were living in. Because the pope approved the Gregorian calendar, New England rejected it, stubbornly continuing to date the start of the new year to March 25.

He was universally charming, as only a writer in pursuit of a publisher can be.

He wrote Véra sheepishly: “Something has happened (only don’t be angry). I can’t remember (for God’s sake, don’t be angry!) I can’t remember (promise that you won’t be angry), I can’t remember your telephone number.” He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.

Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.

Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.

She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. The word ‘honey skinned’ recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably applied to hers as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark skinned.

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.

When Witches assaulted their first victims in Salem village, it was 1691 in North America, 1692 in Europe.