Home > Work > The Witches: Salem, 1692
1 " Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men's dreams. "
― Stacy Schiff , The Witches: Salem, 1692
2 " It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business. "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers. "
6 " When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one. "
7 " Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which "
8 " At a time of shuddering devastation, they stepped in as the dragon-slayers. "
9 " You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one. "
10 " published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced "
11 " Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. "
12 " 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. "
13 " He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped. "
14 " We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We "
15 " 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 "
16 " 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. "
17 " 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. "
18 " 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? "
19 " We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways. "
20 " 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? "
