Quotes About Legacy

For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments. (...) And in stories, endings matter. (...) Endings matter, not just for the person but, perhaps even more, for the ones left behind.

In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

But in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

daughter, if the parents survived into senescence. This was the lot of the poet Emily Dickinson, in Amherst, Massachusetts

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror.

Jessie F. Richardson Foundation

see me now your severed daughter laughing our name into echo all the world shall remember

We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.

our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.

All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.

That we were dying, that we were killing our world - that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes - everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I am going to go out like a fucking meteor!

Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists, and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.

For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me.

Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

They convinced me meaning they had dragged her 4'10 Black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.

When I envision the future, I think of the world I crave for my daughters and my sons. It is thinking for survival of the species- thinking for life.

hadto honor Uncle Vernon's memory.

All that on earth hath life and breath To earth must fall before his spear, And sorrow, saved alone from death, Inscribes above the mighty bier. Vanity, all is vanity. Yes