Quotes About Legacy

He has not lived in vain who dies the day he is told about the Way

Virginia was working in the garden, and her husband Leonard called out for her to come inside, that Hitler was just about to speak on the radio. Virginia refused. "I am planting irises," she said, "and they will be here long after Hitler is gone." And they are. You can go see the irises at their house, still blooming.

Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul's at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

Perhaps that's what's wrong with our time, Mr. Dunworthy, it was founded by Maisry and the bishop's envoy and Sir Bloet. And all the people who stayed and tried to help, like Roche, caught the plague and died.

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now

They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.

Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away? It was in 1884. Did he die by natural causes? No sir. And what were the circumstances surrounding his death? He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way. Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.

History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.

When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.

The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

I'm double bred for death by fire.

The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness.

At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.

The purpose of all families in their lives and in their deaths is to create the traitor who will finally erase their history forever.

All of history [is] a rehearsal for its own extinction.

He lay watching the kid. He was from a prominent Kentucky family and had attended Transylvania College and like many another young man of his class he'd gone west because of a woman.

They were saddened that [Rawlins] was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.

You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressing table drawer. But that's not what's at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale.