Quotes About Legacy

Things got better but I still had to be careful. Very careful in how I raised her. I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down and not to make trouble. I don't care how many times she changes her name. Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it's not my fault. It's not my fault. It's not my fault. It's not.

They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever.

Yummy food, unique attention, playfulness, or loving sternness—these features are often summoned to sweeten one's memory of a grandmother.

All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.

Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.

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

The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children know who they are; they remember, half in glory and half in accusation.

He left me his violin.

Nina Simone helped delay the beginning of the end.

Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. "You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don't remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother's feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can't walk down the steps? My Jesus my." But you said there was no defense. "There ain't." Then what do I do? "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.

La construcción del canon es la construcción de un imperio.

You can't take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours. They stay with you anyway, in your mind. So it's a better thing, a more better thing to have the bones right there with you wherever you go. That way, it frees up your mind.

He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents' past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well.

And they might never forget.

Generational irresponsibility leads to lifetimes of oppression, addiction, and waste.

History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.

While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular

These westbound pioneers slogged through the morass on foot, or in wagons drawn by mules and oxen. Impossible for them to conceive that their mud march would one day become sport for modern Americans

We're not migrating people,' she said. 'We live in our old houses, and eat on our old dishes and use our old silverware everyday. We're close to the past and comfortable with it. We've surrounded our lives with the pictures of all our relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things personality beyond just the material they're made of.

We've always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do. But the past has changed on us. It included a lot of stories it didn't used to.

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy's reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.

Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.