Quotes About Legacy

mean. The biggest regret of his life has been having no last name, no pictures of Pearl, and no way of knowing who his father was. Oh, by the way . . .

This is one of the advantages of dying young. Everybody you left behind will need your help

It's like life has given you this huge challenge to make sure that what was running in your family stops with you and doesn't go on any more than it has.

I was wondering if Chester was going to have any kind of memorial. I figured probably not. Clearly his sons wanted nothing to do with him. Ellie was a new grandmother, and not wanting to travel. And who else was there? Obviously no one, or I wouldn't have been roped into taking over his care. It felt like the best possible advertisement for kindness. Treat people well, otherwise you might die and no one will notice or find it especially relevant to their life.

I shall die, but . . . that is all that I shall do for Death.

You can be a murderous tyrant and the world will remember you fondly but fuck one horse and you will be a horse fucker for all eternity.

Men die. It's practically what they're for.

You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that's almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn't, really, it isn't at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I'll wait.

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

Don't worry," Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. "My old bones will follow yours soon enough.

That's what happens to the old guard, my pup. You can always count on it. We who serve, we who make the world run. When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.

Who liked it hot and hated snow? The Fuckwits did! the Fuckwits did! Who ate up everything that grows? The Fuckwits did! the Fuckwits did! Who drowned the world in oceans blue? The Fuckwits did! the Fuckwits did! Who took the land from me and you? The Fuckwits did, we know it's true! Are you Fuckwits, children dear? We're GARBAGETOWNERS, free and clear! But who made the garbage, rich and rank? the Fuckwits did, and we give thanks.

In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.

I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven. It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just the backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse... and still get a key to the city, and eventually you're just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.

Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood - do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise?

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

I suppose if you have ten children one of them might go into government, which is the same as losing a child really.

I began my life as a character in my father's films.

Try your breath on the bones of everything that has them, remember the best songs and figure out how to write them down so when somebody's blowing on your bones, the songs keep on.

Ancestors. Ghosts. Ghosts we're still married to even though we can't see so much as their shadows on the ground. We're no better than pieces on squares, in a game the past plays with the future.

So I talk to the dead. They're the only ones who can see the whole story. All they've got is story.