The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: 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.

Women, Today, Power

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.

Women, Man, Woman

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

morality, snakes, woman

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

answers, questions, salem, witches

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.

democracy, monarchy, politics

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

dreams, men, witchcraft

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.

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.

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.

feminism, marriage, name-change

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.

marriage, wingman

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

intimacy, marriage, passion

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

cleopatra, history