Quotes About Legacy

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

Enquanto baluarte, a Muralha não fazia sentido. Os hunos, os mongóis e os manchus transpuseram-na quase sem impedimento. (…) Talvez, de uma forma não intencional, ela constituísse menos uma defesa física do que uma monstruosa delimitação. Separava a civilização da barbárie, a luz das trevas.

Most Americans know the Dutch founded what is now Greater New York City. Few realize that their influence is largely the reason New York is New York, the most vibrant and powerful city on the continent, and one with a culture and identity unlike that of anyplace else in the United States.

Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. The secret triumph you keep in your heart.

This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

Here's one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can't. Its scars will never fade.

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom.

Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.

A plane dragged black letters through the air: Happy Birthday America—200 Years of Liberty and Independence. Who paid for it? He couldn't tell, so he added: Love, Buckwheat.

Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.

The way poor Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere. Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

Federal Writers' Project, which collected the life stories of former slaves in the 1930s.

David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

She took her hatchet. She took flint and tinder. And like her mother she dug up her yams.

It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no. Three weeks later she said yes. This time it was her mother talking.

Cora remembered Caesar's words about the men at the factory who were hunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.

You're supposed to pass on something useful to your children.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that's what you do when you take away someone's babies--steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.

the shadow of the master, the reminder that

Even in death the boys were trouble.

Two other women took their own lives that spring, more than usual but nothing remarkable. No one with a name that would be remembered come winter, so shallow was their mark.