Stacy Schiff Quotes

• parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

  Stacy Schiff

  Exercise, Unintended Consequences, Consequence

  12 Copy quote

• And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

  Stacy Schiff

  Facts, Absence, Myth

  5 Copy quote

• As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

  Stacy Schiff

  Dangerous, Educated Women, Educated

  10 Copy quote

• When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

  Stacy Schiff

  Team, Snakes, Storm

  8 Copy quote

• It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

  Stacy Schiff

  Sex, Brain, Her Beauty

  Stacy Schiff (2010). “Cleopatra: A Life”, p.255, Hachette UK

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Husband, Divorce, Rights

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Asking, Lasts

  Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. November 2, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

• Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

  Stacy Schiff

  Ancient, Omen, Ancient History

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Interesting, Groups

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Growing Up, Kids, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Believe, Book

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Rome, Play, Ambitious

  "Interview with Stacy Schiff, author of 'Cleopatra'". Interview with John McMurtrie, www.sfgate.com. December 5, 2010.

  58 Copy quote

• No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

  Stacy Schiff

  World, Territory, Wealth

  Stacy Schiff (2010). “Cleopatra: A Life”, p.287, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• Motherhood is always an act of courage.

  Stacy Schiff

  Motherhood, Acts Of Courage

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Book, Witch Trials

  "Stacy Schiff, author of 'Cleopatra: A Life,' on the perfect biography subject". Interview with Elizabeth Taylor, www.chicagotribune.com.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Long, Males, Shapes

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Clever, Years, Dangerous

  4 Copy quote

• A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

  Stacy Schiff

  Cities, Pages, Naples

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Voice, Finals

  4 Copy quote

• We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.

  Stacy Schiff

  Years, Class, World

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Kids, Justice, Aircraft Carriers

  "Of Mama Grizzly Born?". Interview with Gail Collins, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. August 18, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Library, World

  8 Copy quote

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