Quotes About Legacy

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

The best thing she was, was her children.

People who die bad don't stay in the ground.

Come see, I was thinking. Be the last thing you behold

Her color is a cross she will always carry.

Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A toughter lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it.

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The better life she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

He wants to put his story next to hers...'We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kinda tomorrow.

there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.

What a man leaves behind is what a man is.

If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.

Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before.

You know as well as I do that people who die bad don't stay in the ground.

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her.

cemetery as old as sky

living activity of the dead)

Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

A man ain't nothing but a man, said Baby Suggs. But a son? Well now, that's somebody

The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell again.

Taught me a lesson I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.

Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.