Top 90 Stacy Schiff Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When Witches assaulted their first victims in Salem village, it was 1691 in North America, 1692 in Europe.”

— Stacy Schiff

52. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

60. “Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.”

— Stacy Schiff

61. “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

62. “It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it’s the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.”

— Stacy Schiff

63. “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

64. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited.”

— Stacy Schiff

69. “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

70. “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

71. “One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

73. “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

74. “The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.”

— Stacy Schiff

75. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

80. “For all its erudition, Cleopatra’s Egypt produced no fine historian.”

— Stacy Schiff

81. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

82. “Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile;.”

— Stacy Schiff

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “There was good reason why Cleopatra’s subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions.”

— Stacy Schiff

88. “But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra’s were – for vision, ambition, intellect – universally female.”

— Stacy Schiff

89. “Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?”

— Stacy Schiff

90. “There was nothing to be gained by making a man feel unkind for having to refuse a favor, or weak in revealing his inability to do so.”

— Stacy Schiff

91. “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

92. “Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”

— Stacy Schiff

93. “We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways.”

— Stacy Schiff

94. “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

95. “As a teenager he had observed that success bred presumption and that presumption bred inattention. On the other hand misfortune fostered care and vigilance, by which losses might be reversed.”

— Stacy Schiff

96. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

97. “Though it affected only one family, he believed the ordeal would be of interest to all; already he excelled at inflating a small issue into a larger one, of salvaging radiant principle from a slag heap of detail.”

— Stacy Schiff

98. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff