Quotes from Stacy Schiff

Young Goodman Brown," The Scarlet Letter, or his 1851 bestseller, The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised. The Crucible

but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes' representative attempted to reason. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd.

Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described asthe spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility.

She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatalist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny.

He wrote Véra sheepishly: "Something has happened (only don't be angry). I can't remember (for God's sake, don't be angry!) I can't remember (promise that you won't be angry), I can't remember your telephone number." He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced.

The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself.

It did what a foreign adventure is supposed to do-it made the mundane thrilling.

The stranger acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later.

Protests had been heroic, passionate, erudite, and creative. A young Newport woman refused to marry until the odious legislation was repealed. Other female patriots refused to do their part to populate the colonies, which should serve British manufacturers right.

Until well into the evening, when the vermillion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color.

Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on "the poetic path." She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: "Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said 'Verochka.' It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.

So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her.

For three months of the year they could not be certain what year they were living in. Because the pope approved the Gregorian calendar, New England rejected it, stubbornly continuing to date the start of the new year to March 25.

When Witches assaulted their first victims in Salem village, it was 1691 in North America, 1692 in Europe.

A few months since the idea of witches riding through the air upon a broomstick, and that of philosophers upon a bag of smoke, would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous

Our appetite for the miraculous endures; we continue to want there to be something beyond our ken. We hope to locate the secret powers we didn't know we had, like the ruby slippers Dorothy finds on her feet and that Glinda has to tell her how to work. Where women are concerned, it is preferable that those powers manifest only when crisis strikes; the best heroine is the accidental one.

What good were these experiments?" went the skeptic's question. To which Franklin replied, "What good is a new-born babe?" In some versions he continued: "He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intelligence. Let us wait for him to complete his studies before judging him.

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which

But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra's were—for vision, ambition, intellect—universally female.

America's tiny reign of terror, Salem represents one of the rare moments in our enlightened past when the candles are knocked out and everyone seems to be groping about in the dark, the place where all good stories begin.

He had never been a believer in systems—his was an overweening faith that life lay in the contradictions, not in the formulae, in the doubting, not the certainties, the needs rather than the riches—and political parties seemed to him little more than artificial structures designed to save man from his loneliness.