Quotes About Legacy

To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost.

You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me.

my love for you will outlive me.

Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don't belong and turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

For years he'd strived to make a difference in the world, and he'd worked like a dog to make that happen, and yet here he was, a man sitting on a dock with his children, and never had he felt more certain that his words mattered.

Memories are who we are, Tul. In the end, that's all the luggage you take with you. Love and memories are what last.

She had counted on a lifetime to teach her children what they needed to know, but she didn't have the gift of grace and time. Still, she had given them what mattered: they were loved and they knew it. Everything else was decoration. Love remains.

To damage the earth is to damage your children. —WENDELL BERRY, FARMER AND POET

Remember, cara, hard times don't last. Land and family do.

That's the funny thing about writing your life story. You start out trying to remember dates and times and names. You think it's about facts, your life; that what you'll look back on and remember are the successes and failures, the time line of your youth and middle age, but that isn't it at all. Love. Family. Laughter. That's what I remember when it's all said and done.

How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother's?

It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

Ãœber dieser Fuge, wo der Name B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.Shovel them under and let me work—I am the grass; I cover all.

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin… in the dust, in the cool tombs.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

The future has an ancient heart.

Il Futuro ha un Cuore Antico

O gentlemen, the time of life is short . . . And if we live, we live to tread on kings. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (act 5, scene 2)

Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.

Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be "natural": they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.