Quotes About Legacy

If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.

But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.

Sometimes the past can vanish.

The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything. And they're applying that to now. It's just so ridiculous.

According to her, if he hasn't been dead twenty years, he isn't history.

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

There will never be another Frida.

When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eight years later, waking someone like me in this house... or that you would finally show me hot to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me?

Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates.

We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

People count too long on the oblivion of children.

I shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.

All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.

Mother, you had no life of your own.

Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

Old homecoming queens never die.

Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it.

Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid.

Anything in her mother's handwriting she saved. Willa wanted her also to go on weighing something in the world.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same.