Stacy Schiff Quotes
31 quotes
in 605 categories
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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…
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No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'
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Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.
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A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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!
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.
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When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.
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And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
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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…
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By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.
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