Quotes by Stacy Schiff

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

“Aikhenvald saw Vra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on the poetic path. She was on every count his champion. The wife of another migr writer phrased it differently: Everyone in the Russian community...”

“Vra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that born at a time and place where women could an...”

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

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

“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...”

“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'...”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation i...”

“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 hi...”

“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.'”

“I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good...”

“Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most o...”

“Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a...”

“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 practica...”