Stacy Schiff Quotes

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

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.

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.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

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

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.

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.

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

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

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

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!

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

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.

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

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

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.

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

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.