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" Have you ever been married? Had that thing of someone calling you by a name not your own? It's unsettling. It's like a fictitious person. "
Stacy Schiff
Name
Someone
You
Related Quotes:
" The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we've all molded her to our times and our places. So there's room for a movie for her, but I don't think it will hew to the book. "
Stacy Schiff
Think
History
Book
" Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful? "
Stacy Schiff
Beautiful
I Am
Writing
" I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time. "
Stacy Schiff
Time
Children
Three
" What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority. "
Stacy Schiff
Trying
You
Looks
" Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love. "
Stacy Schiff
Political
Politics
Power
" You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with. "
Stacy Schiff
Day
Dive
See
" I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that. "
Stacy Schiff
Falling In Love
Love
Relationships
" 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
Intelligence
Women
Woman
" Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots. "
Stacy Schiff
Meaning
Words
Reality
" 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
Child
Change
Library
" 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
Women
Voice
Marriage
" 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
Enough
Fly
Off
" From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect. "
Stacy Schiff
Great
Speak
Respect
" 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
Me
Interesting
Book
" In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings. "
Stacy Schiff
World
Class
Star
" I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched. "
Stacy Schiff
Book
Realize
Think
" In 'Plutarch,' her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy. "
Stacy Schiff
Voice
Saucy
Out
" I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind. "
Stacy Schiff
Vision
Think
View
" The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you're 'an artist under oath' you're writing from a mountain of documentation. "
Stacy Schiff
Me
You
Writing
" No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did. "
Stacy Schiff
World
Wealth
Modern
" The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. "
Stacy Schiff
She
Understands
Lives
" Of course, women have long exercised influence behind the scenes. A few thousand years ago this drove Aristotle to distraction: 'What difference does it make whether women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.' "
Stacy Schiff
Long
Behind
Influence
" Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book. "
Stacy Schiff
Reaction
Anxiety
Influence
" 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
Women
Day
Education
" A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price. "
Stacy Schiff
Rich
Woman
Smart
" You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year. "
Stacy Schiff
Year
New York
You
" 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
Great
Book
Education
" 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
Pencil
I Am
Legal
" I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' "
Stacy Schiff
New
Me
Said
" I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates. "
Stacy Schiff
Roommates
Music
Me