Quotes from Stacy Schiff

We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. —ANTON CHEKHOV

Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same." —ARISTOTLE

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

Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile;

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

Men blamed sins for corrupting their souls. Women blamed their souls, which is to say themselves.

The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of trees might freely migrate to another location or that you might find yourself pursued after nightfall by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home, bloody and disoriented, on all fours.

When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one.

How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!

Helvétius's maxims: "It is worth being wise only so long as one can also be foolhardy.

Puberty," it has been said, "is everyone's first experience of a sentient madness.

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

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

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.

It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included.

Dioscorides, an expert on medicinal plants, had ample material on which to base a pioneering treatise on bubonic plague.

there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

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.

Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter.

We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilt in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.

He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.

Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was "unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.

A woman who is generous with her money is to be praised; not so, if she is generous with her person." —QUINTILIAN

It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious.