151 Quotes by 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.

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

The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of trees might freely migrate to another location or that you might find yourself pursued after nightfall by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home, bloody and disoriented, on all fours.

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.

Dioscorides, an expert on medicinal plants, had ample material on which to base a pioneering treatise on bubonic plague.

Puberty,” it has been said, “is everyone’s first experience of a sentient madness.

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

When Witches assaulted their first victims in Salem village, it was 1691 in North America, 1692 in Europe.

When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.