Quotes About Legacy

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

Some day, I must take my own prolific advice and contrive to drop dead.

All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.

We all die,' said Nostradamus. 'The man you love. The man who loves you. The man you married. But because of you there will be something, I promise you, by which men will know Francis Crawford has been.

We met once when you were a boy, at Midculter.' He paused. 'You are not like your brother.' 'No,' Crawford said. He gave his hand another shake and then loosed it with apparent reluctance. 'Richard will never be whipped at a cart-arse for bawdry. I don't know whether you notice, but he wears nothing but mockado and fustian. The graveyard at Culter is full of pauperized mercers.

As a man, this child would be one's offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living grasp of the future.

At the end of life, parent and kinsman are as a blind man set to look after a burning lamp.

But you loved my father,' he said. 'And Eloise's, of course. What was he like?' 'Like you,' Sybilla said. 'And worth all this?' Lymond said. 'Yes,' said Sybilla. 'Don't you, of all people, know what love can do?

Then I tell you," Sybilla said, "that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live. You live until no device of priest or leech will hold the web of your body together. And when you walk from this room, you turn your back on France and your face towards the place of your life's work. I want your oath that you will come back to Scotland.

Do you think I bring any child into the world to live for himself alone?

There is a new game about to begin. Will you leave it to others?' 'As you will leave it to your son,' said Francis Crawford. 'It is all I find I can do.

Someone sobbed. Someone said, 'It is finished. Remember me no longer; or my children, or my children's children.'

He lived in her, his disciple. For her to think, now, as he would have done. And to act always thereafter.

Men throughout Scotland and over the narrow seas who lived different lives because they had known him. To carry his bright legacy into the future, he did not require to have children. No one, once they had met him, could remain the same.

If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.

Why not? I thought we were speaking of death and dishonour? You would advance to your grave and I should join the ranks of your numerous dead: Diccon and Salablanca, Tosh and Christian Stewart; Oonagh; Will Scott and his father; Turkey Mat and Tom Erskine; the dog Luadhas; the child Khaireddin.… What shall I say to your son when I meet him? Don't be surprised: your sire loved me also?'

And, long since ashore with his men and his booty, Crawford of Lymond, man of wit and crooked felicities, bred to luxury and heir to a fortune, rode off serenely to Midculter to break into his new sister-in-law's castle.

Don't you think they would all have been happier if Francis Crawford had never existed?

If I am dead I cannot sponsor your travels. Except, clearly, in a direction you will never be called on to follow.

I do not exist. What you have in your hand is my death certificate.

We've all those, and we've the rest, like yourself, who carry the throne on their backs from generation to generation—maybe just because you've so much at stake in Scotland that there's no other game worth the risk; still you do it.

The door shut behind them all, and locked. The women stared at it, mesmerized, and observed across it the wavering shadow of an uncanny cloud. Behind the chamfered windows the sun was obscured by drifting wreaths of grey smoke, and the silence filled with the crackling of flames. The youngest surviving Crawford, in leaving, had deftly set fire to the castle.

Tact,' Lymond said, 'is the name you should have upon your tombstone.

She wondered what archaeologists in the year A.D. 10,000 would find when they uncovered the relics of the twentieth century; would there, she wondered, be any signs of intelligence remaining? or only vestiges of folly and violence?