Quotes About Legacy

a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footprints.

When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can't go away from them.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.

In one great case a man [Winston Churchill] who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of the country [1941]. One of Rowe's last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.

All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

It seemed odd that a man's smell should cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the man himself had become dead matter, a gas, a decay.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.

It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.

The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a 'development', it was a legacy.

Despite the wanton destruction during the past 200 years, some outstanding sites have been saved in Louisiana,1 Mississippi,2 Alabama,3 Tennessee,4 Illinois,5 and Ohio,6 and there are also significant sites in Florida,7 Georgia,8 Texas,9 Arkansas,10 Kentucky,11 and Indiana.

Eight thousand years is a very long time but

No pyramids of comparable quality were ever built again.

You can be an aging rock star, but you can't be an aging wannabe rock star.

I suppose that's all a man can hope for during his lifetime,' nodded Horus, 'to set an example, and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history

Too often we look back on our lives and wish we could have our time again. To do better, to do more, to walk the paths not taken. But I have loved and I have learned. I have done my best to pass on my experiences to others. And in that I have no regrets.

No man lives forever and even as memory fades, so too will any remembrance of him.

A man may die yet still endure if his work enters the greater work, for time is carried upon a current of forgotten deeds, and events of great moment are but the culmination of a single carefully placed thought,' said Vitali, reciting the ancient words of wisdom as though they were his own. 'As all men must thank progenitors obscured by the past, so we must endure the present so that those who follow may continue the endeavour.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it's gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there's a memory for them to happen in …

Così come noi siamo fatti per un decimo di tessuti viventi e per nove decimi di acqua, così la vita è per un decimo Qui e Ora, e per nove decimi è una lezione di storia. Per la maggior parte del tempo, il Qui e Ora non è nè qui nè ora.

Could she have done what she'd done today if she'd had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn't yet know she was going to have? Could her mother have known, making her dreadful choice, how she had blessed her?

Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.

Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright.

Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences. Wasn't that true of every creator? Didn't anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment? The poor human Prometheuses who brought fire to their fellows. Nobel.