Aikhenvald saw Vera 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 ‘Veronika.’ It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

As Did 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

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

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

— Stacy Schiff

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

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

— Stacy Schiff