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c1ff938
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History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.
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history
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Stacy Schiff |
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701f7cf
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Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly.
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Stacy Schiff |
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e563b24
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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.
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Stacy Schiff |
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df73ed6
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Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.
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Stacy Schiff |
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36d8959
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To one visitor Alexandrian life was "just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined."
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Stacy Schiff |
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52f1277
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He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.
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Stacy Schiff |
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7687ec5
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We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We
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Stacy Schiff |
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c51ee65
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but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.
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Stacy Schiff |
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ba1d57a
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With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.
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Stacy Schiff |
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4990017
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Vera 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 Vera's case..
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marriage
name-change
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Stacy Schiff |
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c456566
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Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image
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Stacy Schiff |
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0f45711
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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. Often what pinches and pricks, gnaws, claws, stabs, and suffocates, like a seventeenth-century witch, is the irritatingly unsolved puzzle in the next room. The
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Stacy Schiff |
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7ce4e92
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Our appetite for the miraculous endures; we continue to want there to be something beyond our ken. We hope to locate the secret powers we didn't know we had, like the ruby slippers Dorothy finds on her feet and that Glinda has to tell her how to work. Where women are concerned, it is preferable that those powers manifest only when crisis strikes; the best heroine is the accidental one.
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Stacy Schiff |
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92a539a
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What good were these experiments?" went the skeptic's question. To which Franklin replied, "What good is a new-born babe?" In some versions he continued: "He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intelligence. Let us wait for him to complete his studies before judging him."
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Stacy Schiff |
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efde5df
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When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects; and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home. --Thomas Jefferson
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Stacy Schiff |
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4f441c1
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In Europe pedigree might be all, "but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to a worse market than to that of America, where people do not enquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but what can he do?"
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Stacy Schiff |
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3e24f17
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Judging by the edicts passed to regulate commerce alone, Franklin stood ready to conclude that "an assembly of wise men is the greatest fool upon earth."
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Stacy Schiff |
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bfd9b8c
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As a teenager he had observed that success bred presumption and that presumption bred inattention. On the other hand misfortune fostered care and vigilance, by which losses might be reversed.
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Stacy Schiff |
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3eb18f0
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Hutton and Franklin spent all of January 3 together, in the course of which Franklin evidently informed his old friend, "You have only left us the option of perishing by you or with you: we have chosen the latter alternative."
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Stacy Schiff |
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e68d4e1
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In the only letter he wrote that Christmas, Franklin conceded that he no longer coveted the Brillon house as once he had. His feelings for his neighbor's wife remained constant, however. If in her travels she was to meet the Holy Father, he hoped she might petition him for a repeal of the Ten Commandments. They were miserably inconvenient.
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Stacy Schiff |
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fef318a
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Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain. A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, t..
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Stacy Schiff |
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076fc46
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There was nothing to be gained by making a man feel unkind for having to refuse a favor, or weak in revealing his inability to do so.
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Stacy Schiff |
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624dfd2
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quickly Franklin folded the owlish John Adams into his debilitating rounds, sweeping him off to meet the la Rochefoucauld family in their baronial home. He did so before Adams yet felt appropriately outfitted for any kind of Parisian outing. That anxiety would underline the difference between the two envoys, one of them self-conscious about his attire, the other confident that fashion would follow him, both of whom were right.
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Stacy Schiff |
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34dd074
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He was the world-renowned tamer of lightning, the man who had disarmed the heavens, who had vanquished superstition with reason.
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Stacy Schiff |
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0b22462
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In John Adams's worst nightmare, the story of the American Revolution assumed a different formulation: "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod--and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislatures, and war."
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Stacy Schiff |
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bf2e408
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The First Mistake in Public Business Is the Going into It
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Stacy Schiff |
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4f20f62
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a man who spoke no English, who would argue that whole conversations could be sustained in that language with the use of a single word (Goddamn),
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Stacy Schiff |
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a374f7d
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John Jay would offer the best analysis later, to George Washington: "There is as much intrigue in this state house as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school."
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Stacy Schiff |
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b4d9ea1
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Franklin was perfectly philosophical on the subject: "For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views."
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Stacy Schiff |
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35881ba
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He is drunk at least 22 hours of every 24 and never without one or two whores in company.")"
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Stacy Schiff |
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b220e9e
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The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was--in Voltaire's description--the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.
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Stacy Schiff |
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861caa2
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Beaumarchais sighed, consumed by his own labors, "politics only rewards success. Best efforts earn only a bitter smile."
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Stacy Schiff |
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ecbb2c7
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The motto over Chaumont's door read, "Se sta bene non se muove," which a later American tenant translated, overly literally, as "If you stand well, stand still."
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Stacy Schiff |
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52ce163
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Believe me there's no spiteful stupidity, no horror, no absurd story that one can't get the idle-minded folk of a great city to swallow if one goes the right way about it--
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Stacy Schiff |
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d917b4d
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Franklin informed his caller that the colonies understood precisely what they were doing, "for we know that separated both countries must become weak; but there is this difference, Great Britain will always remain weak; America after a time, will grow strong."
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Stacy Schiff |
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5c88fb7
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Cotton Mather believed sixty drops of lavender and a mouthful of gingerbread cured memory loss.
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Stacy Schiff |