The collection / 19 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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19 results · Page 1 of 1Play this collection ▷

01Undated

Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men's dreams.

Stacy Schiff / quote

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02Undated

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 / quote

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03Undated

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

Stacy Schiff / quote

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04Undated

It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.

Stacy Schiff / quote

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05Undated

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

Stacy Schiff / quote

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06Undated

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

Stacy Schiff / quote

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07Undated

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.

Stacy Schiff / quote

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08Undated

Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that – born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions – she should elevate the role of wife to a high art. […] Traditionally, a man changes his name and braces himself for fame; a woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. This was not to be Véra’s case, although she did gather her married name around her like a cloak, which she occasionally opened to startling effect. She would never be forced to make a woman’s historic choice between love and work. Nor would Verochka, as Vladimir called her, squander any of her professional training, though as it happened her husband would be the direct (and sole) beneficiary of that expertise.

Stacy Schiff / quote

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09Undated

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

Stacy Schiff / quote

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10Undated

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 / quote

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11Undated

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

Stacy Schiff / quote

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12Undated

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 / quote

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13Undated

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

Stacy Schiff / quote

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14Undated

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 / quote

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15Undated

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 / quote

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16Undated

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 / quote

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17Undated

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 / quote

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18Undated

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 / quote

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19Undated

Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a yellow legal pad. There's good reason for this primitive behavior: I am a crackerjack typist. My hand moves far more quickly than my brain.

Stacy Schiff / quote

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