Quotes About Legacy

Cassie, Griff told you not to ride. Griff told you not to talk about the baby to the point you don't know a thing about what's to come. Griff told you a woman was unclean when she was carryin' a child. Griff mortgaged all your family heirlooms without telling you so you could have a useless new silk dress every year. Excuse me for speakin' ill of the dead, Cass, but your husband wasn't very smart, was he?

IF YOU WANT A STORYBOOK ENDING, stop—now—and remember them in that tender moment. Be content to know that they embarked on a series of adventures throughout the West and that they stayed together through thick and thin for forty-five years. But know this as well: If their story ended here, no one would remember them at all. Where a tale begins and where it ends matters. Who tells the story, and why . . . That makes all the difference.

When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works. And the hundredth boy? We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.

This much is sure: if Kate hadn't gone back to Doc Holiday on the afternoon of June 10th, 1878, you never would have heard of him. You wouldn't know the names of Wyatt Earp, or any of his brothers. The Clantons and McLaurys would be utterly forgotten. And Tombstone would be nothing more than an Arizona ghost town with an ironic name. Too late now.

the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.

I want to belong with someone. I want to feel at the center of something, and not the edge. I want children and grandchildren. I don't want to grow old and die, knowing that when I die, there will be no more like me.

One had to be patient to thrive in Rome, where time is measured not in centuries but in millennia

Only here had he come to understand that he was not a battleground—to be divided and conquered by his grandparents—but a garden, where each person who'd contributed to his existence longed to see that something of themselves had taken root and grown.

Art is only good at the moment it's done. After that it's dead. It's just so much dead shit. Artists are like people trying to hoard their shit.

It's hard to be an articulate ghost.

Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it.

have added something to knowledge and helped others to add more; and these somethings have a value that differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one.

To promote a book so long after it's in print makes you—according to novelist Ian McEwan—an employee of your former self.

A trophy carries dust. Memories last forever.

É por isso que, quando prego e funerais, digo que a morte é a derradeira cura, porque é na morte que nos tornamos finalmente quem somos.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?

I would like people to remember of me, how inexhaustible was her mindfulness.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

There was someone I loved who grew old and ill. One by one I watched the fires go out. There was nothing I could do except to remember that we receive then we give back.