Stacy Schiff quotes - page 2

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)
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.' View quote
Stacy Schiff
Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional. View quote
Stacy Schiff
parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences. View quote
Stacy Schiff
Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens. View quote
Stacy Schiff
Motherhood is always an act of courage. View quote
Stacy Schiff
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. View quote
Stacy Schiff
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. View quote
Stacy Schiff
No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,' View quote
Stacy Schiff
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. View quote
Stacy Schiff