Quotes About Legacy

a happy life is not made up of what you have dreamed of, chased after, and achieved, but rather whom you poured your life into, who poured their life into yours, and the difference you've made in the lives of others.

We are, all of us, living out the stories of our lives. Each of our stories will end, in time, but meanwhile, we fill the pages of our existence with all the love we can, for as long as we can. This is how we make a life.

we are all on the road that leads to the edge of our mortality. Life is too brief to waste a minute of it chasing after things that don't matter.

a happy life is not made up of what you have dreamed of, chased after, and achieved, but rather whom you poured your life into, who poured their life into yours, and the difference you've made in the lives of others. Most of the dreams we pursue don't have intrinsic worth, but people always do.

The past hadn't been erased just because a new future had been handed it.

This ghost was the ship.

After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

The nearer I get to death, the more alive I feel. The more I consider my own mortality, the less afraid I am of dying. And the older I get, the more readily I can put myself aside.

Just how much life is left in Confederate ghosts became clear to the world, at the latest, with the election of Donald J. Trump.

It's still not clear that the South lost the war," said Diane. "It's driving the national agenda, after all. You can see it with Trump; that's the same population who elected George Wallace.

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

How we remember the past constrains the possibilities we consider for the future.

If the name Ole Miss evokes football fields and magnolias for its alumni, it evokes tear gas and shotguns for others.

As Cummings pointed out when the museum opened in 2014, there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Israel, Germany, and Poland combined, but not one devoted to slavery.

What is certain: it's good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome.

I doubt that anyone in town belongs to the Klan, or even its more respectable cousin, the White Citizens' Council. They'd simply prefer to leave the past unexamined, cover it with honeysuckle, and go back to their bourbon. It's the kind of response that ensures no one will reflect on the ways that past seeps into present.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

If only feelings and ideas and stories and history really could be contained in a block of marble—if only there could be a gathering up of permanence—how reassuring it would be, how comforting to think that something you loved could be held in place, moored and everlasting, rather than bobbing along on the slippery sea of reminiscence, where it could always drift out of reach.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writers mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: they take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books "the potency of life.

They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If

Books cannot be killed by fire," he declared. "People die, but books never die.

Many people who collect orchids designate an orchid heir in their wills, because they know the plants will outlast them.