Quotes About Legacy

But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.

So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, "It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.

In the words of so many daughters who don't yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I'm not going to be anything like my mother.

I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.

I thought, When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.

It wasn't the victory of one man or the death of another. It was the death of the future, and of our youth, because we might be rather old before the conservers left and the compassionate men came back. Saturday.

I remember with gratitude the banner carried by some very old and bawdy women who led the parade while I was a student: hardly a man is now alive, who remembers the girls of '95.)

If I pressed and said, "But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

Death is the price you paid for being born.

But what doesn't die is the love we give to others. There is no end to that.

He apparently intends to pass the castle on to his eldest daughter.' 'His daughter?' This was news to Pagan. Colin shrugged. 'They're Scots,' he said, as if that would explain it all.

The old lose one of the greatest privileges of man, for they are no longer judged by their contemporaries.

What you inherit from your father must first be earned before it's yours.

Tot ce sclipe?te ?ine doar o clip?, ce-i cu temei în veci va fi p?strat.

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all in this way. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.

L'héritage qui t'est venu de ton ancêtre, Il te faut l'acquérir pour le mieux posséder. Conserver sans besoin, c'est se donner un maître Et rien, hors du présent, ne peut nous profiter.

What glitters, lives but for the moment; what has real worth, survives for all posterity.

The likeness of a man is quite independent; everywhere that it stands, it stands for itself, and we do not require it to mark the site of a particular grave. But I must acknowledge to you to having a strange feeling; even to likenesses I have a kind of disinclination. Whenever I see them they seem to be silently reproaching me. They point to something far away from us,—gone from us; and they remind me how difficult it is to pay right honor to the present.

Faydas?z bir hayat, erken bir ölümdür.

Kas spindi – t? akimirka paglemžia, / O tikras menas pasilieka amžiams.

It's not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.