Stacy Schiff Quotes

31 quotes in 605 categories

• 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…
• 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.
• A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.
• I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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!
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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.
• Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which…
• By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

Browse Stacy Schiff Quotes by Category