Quotes About Legacy

No man is an adult while his parents are alive. Until they die he is merely a performance to either please or punish them.

Do NOT die while wearing cheap shoes.

Brandy says not to watch myself too close. Honey, she says, times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.

Crying is right at hand when you see how everything you ever accomplished will end up as trash.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.

Death is the one big mistake that none of us ever plans to make

Tyler never knew his father.

Imagine there's no God. There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only your son and his son and his son, and the world you leave for them.

He'd made nothing of his life, so the best he could imagine was to conceive another of himself. A do-over: Jimmy 2.0. As if to give himself a second shot, and doing so would shift the burden to this new him and give the current Jimmy permission to squander what was left of his years.

Death isn't the end of peril. There are deaths beyond death. Like it or not, death isn't the end of anything.

Haunting her was the idea that we each summon our own death.

For anything to endure it must be made of either granite or words.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?" I say, goodnight. The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling, and Tyler says, Clawing at the lid of her coffin.

I know, I know, in that totally archetypal Tom Sawyer scenario it's supposed to be way satisfying to attend your own funeral and witness how everyone secretly loved and adored you, but the sad truth is that most people are just as fakey-fake to you after you're dead as when you're alive.

Qué sería de Jesús si nadie hubiera escrito los Evangelios?

In this maze of antiques, she says, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned this furniture. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishments this furniture was supposed to represent, it's all vanished.

As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author.

He was tired of learning history. He wanted to be it. Charlie wanted the history of the future to be him.

Tyler lies back and asks, If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?" I say, goodnight. The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling, and Tyler says, Clawing at the lid of her coffin.

Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

You know, Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose. I'm high right now so it's okay if I tell you this. Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. First, Manus says, your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels? Four minutes. I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I'll make you a legend. I've been here from the beginning. I remember everything.

The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.