Quotes About Legacy

Art outlasts individual whim, family pride, society's orthodoxy; art always has time on its side.

What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records -- in words, sound, pictures -- you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping.

God damn it, he was thinking, this dying business is difficult. They just won't let you get on with it, not on your own terms, anyway. You have to die on other people's terms, and that's a bore, love them as you might.

He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound.

de todo ello: «Más vale malograr la ancianidad que no saber qué hacer con ella.»

Duty done, only child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer's and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That'd be a start.

c'est moi» es una alusión a la respuesta que dio Cervantes cuando en su lecho de muerte le preguntaron por el origen de su famoso personaje. Cf. Travestismo.

Don't think ill of me, remember me well. Tell people you were fond of me, that you loved me, that I wasn't a bad guy. Even if, perhaps, none of this was the case.

His grandfather had white peacocks roosting in a catalpa tree.

And then there is the inevitable third stylisation—of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction.

drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. This

From what I did and what I said Let them not seek to find who I was

L'arte appartiene a tutti e a nessuno. L'arte appartiene a tutti i tempi e a nessun tempo in particolare. L'arte appartiene a chi la produce e a chi l'assapora. L'arte non appartiene più al Popolo e al Partito di quanto una volta non appartenesse all'aristocrazia e ai mecenati. L'arte è il mormorio della storia, udibile al di là del rumore del tempo. L'arte non esiste per sé: esiste per il pubblico.

Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?

There is a religion somewhere in the world that believes we all die twice; once in the normal way and the second time when the last person who really knew us dies, so one's living memory is gone from the earth.

be honest, he sometimes felt a creeping impatience for his father to quit the scene, leaving John as his uncle's direct heir.

Our stories are what we are. Our stories preserve us. We give them to one another. Our stories have value

And now I live with that sin of cowardice on my face forever.

Like my ancestors, I believe that stories can save us. Our stories are our greatest currency. What one person is willing to share with another is a test of intimacy, a gift that's given.

I wouldn't mind that as my epitaph.

Ah, Lyon: the Achilles' heel of this family. She had forgotten about Lyon, and about disappearing Redmonds.

For what it's worth . . . I don't think anyone you love is ever truly gone. I do very much feel their absence . . . but I also feel their presence all the time, in a new way. In some ways they're with me now more than ever. I don't know if that makes sense.

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. — ECCLESIASTICUS 44:8–9 Barn

In time, your spirit will be with them again, perhaps in a great, spreading tree that shades the place where your grandchildren play. Maybe in a wide-winged eagle soaring aloft, watching as your dear one spreads her linen on the hawthorns to dry and looks suddenly to the sky, shading her eyes against the sunlight. You will be there, and they will know.