Stacy Schiff Quotes & Sayings

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix. — Stacy Schiff

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

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 guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

Diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious — Stacy Schiff

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception. — Stacy Schiff

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature. — Stacy Schiff

Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers. — Stacy Schiff

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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: — Stacy Schiff

Parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences. — Stacy Schiff

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman. — Stacy Schiff

Everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that. — Stacy Schiff

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. — Stacy Schiff

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

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. — Stacy Schiff

Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs? — Stacy Schiff

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

Everyone has a captivity narrative; today we call it memoir. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

Motherhood is always an act of courage. — Stacy Schiff

(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

The Massachusetts elite had read everything in sight, some of it too closely. As would be said of logic-loving Ipswich minister John Wise, those men were not so much the masters as the victims of learning. They had read and reread bushels of witchcraft texts. They parsed legal code. They knew their history. They worked in the sterling name of reason. — Stacy Schiff

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 have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier. — Stacy Schiff

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

We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome. — Stacy Schiff

You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year. — Stacy Schiff

There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions. — Stacy Schiff

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. — Stacy Schiff

You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

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. — Stacy Schiff

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

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional. — Stacy Schiff

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 took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts. — Stacy Schiff

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. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity. — Stacy Schiff

With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century. — Stacy Schiff

Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. — Stacy Schiff

The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history. — Stacy Schiff

When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil. — Stacy Schiff

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

Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version. — Stacy Schiff

What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: "He was a spendthrift of money and chastity - his own and other people's." The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar's charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour - at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife's arm? — Stacy Schiff

The first known prosecution took place in Egypt around 1300 BC, for a crime that would today constitute practicing medicine without a license. (That supernatural medic was male.) Descended from Celtic horned gods and Teutonic folklore, Pan's distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church. — Stacy Schiff

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. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry. — Stacy Schiff

Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile; — Stacy Schiff

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

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 — Stacy Schiff

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

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

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere. — Stacy Schiff

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

A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age ... Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one. — Stacy Schiff

Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as""the 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. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

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

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

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

published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced — Stacy Schiff

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

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

For some of the things that plagued the seventeenth-century New Englander we have modern-day explanations. For others we do not. We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, the 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. 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 guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. We have all believed that someone had nothing better to do than spend his day plotting against us. The seventeenth-century world appeared full of inexplicables, not unlike the automated, mind-reading, algorithmically enhanced modern one. — Stacy Schiff

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

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well. — Stacy Schiff

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

I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time. — Stacy Schiff

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

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

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