The Witches Quotes

“We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife’s arm?”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Women play the villains in fairy tales—what are you saying when you place the very emblem of lowly domestic duty between your legs and ride off, defying the bounds of community and laws of gravity?”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“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.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“The witch hunt stands as a cobwebbed, crowd-sourced cautionary tale, a reminder that—as a minister at odds with the crisis noted—extreme right can blunder into extreme wrong.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilt in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“For some of the things that plagued the seventeenth-century New Englander we have modern-day explanations. For others we do not. We have believed in any number of things—the tooth fairy, cold fusion, the 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. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. We have all believed that someone had nothing better to do than spend his day plotting against us. The seventeenth-century world appeared full of inexplicables, not unlike the automated, mind-reading, algorithmically enhanced modern one.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a son or a son implicated a father.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Men blamed sins for corrupting their souls. Women blamed their souls, which is to say themselves.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“The most reckless volume on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witch Hammer, summoned a shelf of classical authorities to prove its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Weak as she was to devilish temptations, a woman could emerge dangerously, insatiably commanding. According to the indispensable Malleus, even in the absence of occult power, women constituted “a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment.” The”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. —ANTON CHEKHOV”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“And if you take away my life,” she threatened, “God will give you blood to drink.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“IN 1692 THE Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of trees might freely migrate to another location or that you might find yourself pursued after nightfall by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home, bloody and disoriented, on all fours.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Not long thereafter Lawson committed an indiscretion that left him issuing solemn apologies to the London ministry. He acknowledged having dishonored his profession with his “uneven and unwary conversation.” He battled for several years to clear his name. The offense may have had nothing to do with sensationalistic witchcraft pronouncements; he may simply have drunk too much. He had however spoken carelessly, as he could be said to have done in 1692. By 1714 he lived in abject poverty, his family starving, his three young children infected with smallpox, his wife debilitated.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“When Witches assaulted their first victims in Salem village, it was 1691 in North America, 1692 in Europe.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“For three months of the year they could not be certain what year they were living in. Because the pope approved the Gregorian calendar, New England rejected it, stubbornly continuing to date the start of the new year to March 25.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“The stranger acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“America’s tiny reign of terror, Salem represents one of the rare moments in our enlightened past when the candles are knocked out and everyone seems to be groping about in the dark, the place where all good stories begin.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“The first known prosecution took place in Egypt around 1300 BC, for a crime that would today constitute practicing medicine without a license. (That supernatural medic was male.) Descended from Celtic horned gods and Teutonic folklore, Pan's distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Puberty,” it has been said, “is everyone’s first experience of a sentient madness.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Young Goodman Brown,” The Scarlet Letter, or his 1851 bestseller, The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised. The Crucible”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692