Quotes About Legacy

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot do.

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

We are remember e for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot so.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them. I

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining

I will live forever, or at least until I'm forty-five.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don't care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

Literary posterity may

Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.

A book becomes popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?

You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?' Clawing at the roof of her coffin.

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.