Quotes About Legacy

Judith Shakespeare] lives in you and in me [...] she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.

Thats what makes a view so sad, and so beautiful. It'll be there when we're not.

Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural saveragery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerers and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

But because there is something that comes from outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when my voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice that once wreathed the fruit into phrases.

These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt.

Gold runs in our blood.

Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.

What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

De vreme ce apariÈ›iile noastre, adic? partea din noi care apare, sunt atât de trec?toare, comparate cu cealalt?, partea nev?zut? din noi, care se întinde departe, înseamn? c? partea nev?zut? poate supravieÈ›ui, poate fi cumva recuperat?, ataÈ™at? unei persoane sau alteia, sau poate chiar bântui anumite locuri, dup? moarte.

women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers – a woman's always proud of her father.

And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other.

a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.

We have destroyed something by our presence," said Bernard, "a world perhaps.

I should implore you to remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should remind you how much depends on you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future.

Is it permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies ow men will think of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?

Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater — to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason.

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote

Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring Of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of MONDAY OR TUESDAY, which has been long out of print. She left

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today?

Are you sure you don't have a crazy hairy grandmother in your family?

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.