Top 100 Stacy Schiff Quotes
#1. Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.
Stacy Schiff
#2. Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.
Stacy Schiff
#3. 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't know yet which ones they are.
Stacy Schiff
#4. It did what a foreign adventure is supposed to do-it made the mundane thrilling.
Stacy Schiff
#5. Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another.
Stacy Schiff
#6. 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 history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.
Stacy Schiff
#7. 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 are a matter of politics, not a matter of love.
Stacy Schiff
#8. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.
Stacy Schiff
#9. A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily - with wheat, barley, lentils - to feed Alexandria alone.
Stacy Schiff
#10. We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.
Stacy Schiff
#11. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter.
Stacy Schiff
#12. As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.
Stacy Schiff
#13. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#14. You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with.
Stacy Schiff
#15. It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.
Stacy Schiff
#17. What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.
Stacy Schiff
#18. From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect.
Stacy Schiff
#19. Of course, women have long exercised influence behind the scenes. A few thousand years ago this drove Aristotle to distraction: 'What difference does it make whether women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.'
Stacy Schiff
#20. 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, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.
Stacy Schiff
#21. No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.
Stacy Schiff
#22. A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.
Stacy Schiff
#23. A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages; silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.
Stacy Schiff
#24. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#25. It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included.
Stacy Schiff
#26. The art of speaking," it was later said, "depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense.
Stacy Schiff
#27. Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.
Stacy Schiff
#28. No biographical subject is ever on hold with the orthodontist. If there's a dry spell, it's your job to curtail or eliminate it.
Stacy Schiff
#29. The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we've all molded her to our times and our places. So there's room for a movie for her, but I don't think it will hew to the book.
Stacy Schiff
#30. The witch hunt stands as a cobwebbed, crowd-sourced cautionary tale, a reminder that - as a minister at odds with the crisis noted - extreme right can blunder into extreme wrong.
Stacy Schiff
#31. When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.
Stacy Schiff
#32. There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions.
Stacy Schiff
#33. I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates.
Stacy Schiff
#34. Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly.
Stacy Schiff
#35. 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 themselves in a sort of straitjacket.
Stacy Schiff
#36. By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.
Stacy Schiff
#37. And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
Stacy Schiff
#38. Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.
Stacy Schiff
#39. I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.
Stacy Schiff
#40. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.
Stacy Schiff
#41. Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.
Stacy Schiff
#42. For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god." - HESIOD
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#43. Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
Stacy Schiff
#44. 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 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship.
Stacy Schiff
#45. Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.
Stacy Schiff
#46. She knew neither that she was living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra.
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#47. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#48. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#49. The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.
Stacy Schiff
#50. With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.
Stacy Schiff
#51. Nor was there a Greek word for "incest." The Ptolemies carried the practice to an extreme. Of the fifteen or so family marriages, at least ten were full brother-sister unions.
Stacy Schiff
#52. 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.'
Stacy Schiff
#53. Everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.
Stacy Schiff
#54. Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same. - ARISTOTLE
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#55. And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existence:
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#56. He was universally charming, as only a writer in pursuit of a publisher can be.
Stacy Schiff
#57. You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year.
Stacy Schiff
#58. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#59. Parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.
Stacy Schiff
#60. No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'
Stacy Schiff
#61. For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.
Stacy Schiff
#62. I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that.
Stacy Schiff
#63. 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!
Stacy Schiff
#64. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#65. In 'Plutarch,' her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy.
Stacy Schiff
#66. 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 first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.
Stacy Schiff
#67. The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you're 'an artist under oath' you're writing from a mountain of documentation.
Stacy Schiff
#68. For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.
Stacy Schiff
#69. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#70. Have you ever been married? Had that thing of someone calling you by a name not your own? It's unsettling. It's like a fictitious person.
Stacy Schiff
#71. How does a woman in authority convey that authority? Is it possible for a woman to rule without sounding shrill? Is it possible for a woman to manage without manipulating? All of these things seem to me to be very much at the fore today, and were no less the case 2,000 years ago.
Stacy Schiff
#72. Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.
Stacy Schiff
#73. History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.
Stacy Schiff
#74. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day.
Stacy Schiff
#75. Diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious
Stacy Schiff
#76. Dioscorides, an expert on medicinal plants, had ample material on which to base a pioneering treatise on bubonic plague.
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#77. 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 read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.
Stacy Schiff
#78. They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one. In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain time.
Stacy Schiff
#79. I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched.
Stacy Schiff
#80. Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regularity in Alexandria.
Stacy Schiff
#81. Everyone has a captivity narrative; today we call it memoir.
Stacy Schiff
#82. In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings.
Stacy Schiff
#83. 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 form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.
Stacy Schiff
#84. Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile;
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#85. We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. - ANTON CHEKHOV
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#86. 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.
Stacy Schiff
#87. Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.
Stacy Schiff
#88. Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?
Stacy Schiff
#89. 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 seemed to change.
Stacy Schiff
#90. 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, were dangerous.
Stacy Schiff
#91. Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.
Stacy Schiff
#92. I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time.
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#93. To one visitor Alexandrian life was just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.
Stacy Schiff
#94. Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered.
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#95. You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.
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#96. The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history.
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#97. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.)
Stacy Schiff
#98. Puberty," it has been said, "is everyone's first experience of a sentient madness.
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#99. published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced
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#100. For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.
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