Quotes About Legacy

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this.

Writing is a journey into the unknown. Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won't be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can't help but be that. But more importantly, if you're honest about who you are, you'll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.

If I read something somebody wrote 300 years ago, and it's me, what I'm going through now in my head, it sends chills down my spine, and I feel like that's what I want to be able to offer — that if I offer myself, there's a chance somebody else will feel connected.

When one considers the multitude of unsung of every race, ethnicity, gender, perhaps toiling away in obscurity, their work thrown out after their deaths by philistine relatives and vulgarian landlords, one must weep. And one does.

Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors....

People live, and then they die, and as long as they do both things propertly, there's nothing much to regret.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days..

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father.

Hanya kisahlah... yang bisa menghindarkan keturunan kita dari membuat kesalahan besar seperti pengemis-pengemis buta yang menabrak duri-duri pagar kaktus. (Anthills of The Savannah)

In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest - without asking to be paid.

Okonkwo was ruled by one passion -- to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

La vida de un hombre desde el nacimiento hasta la muerte era una serie de ritos de paso que le acercaban cada vez más a sus antepasados.

Tant que les lions n'auront pas leurs propres historiens, l'histoire de la chasse glorifiera toujours le chasseur

It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, my son, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live. The man who has never submitted to anything will soon submit to the burial mat.

The boy who persists in asking what happened to his father before he has enough strength to avenge him is asking for his father's fate...

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

Chinua Achebe (Author)

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey In

ELVIS & MARILYN: The deader they get - the more money they make.