Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men’s dreams.
And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.
History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.
Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.
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.
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.
When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.
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.
Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.
When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, ‘Oh, that’s okay. That’s not a real book.’