Quotes About Legacy

Di tutto ciò che è uscito dalle sordide gole degli anziani, dai vecchi libri ammuffiti, non ho salvato una parola. Ho sognato che camminavo con mio nonno sulla riva di un lago scuro e i discorsi del vecchio erano pieni di incertezza. Ho visto come tutto ciò che è finto si stacca dai morti.

The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

At one time I could have seen myself living there. It was built by my great-grandfather. I've seen photographs of it and it was quite beautiful.

All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction

for a thing once set in motion has no ending in this world until the last witness has passed

and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers

Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?

Death is what the living carry with them.

Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.

The house was built in 1872. Seventy-seven years later his grandfather was the first to die in it. What others had lain in state in that hallway had been carried there on a gate or wrapped in a wagonsheet or delivered crated up in a raw pineboard box with a teamster standing at the door with a bill of lading. The ones that came at all. For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram.

Suttree reached across the little space and took his uncle's willowing hands and composed them. I dont blame you, he said. I just want to tell you how some people are. I know how people are. I should know. Why should you? You think my father and his kind are a race apart. You can laugh at their pretensions, but you never question their right to the way of life they maintain.

One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie?

They used to have names but they dont anymore. The last witness who could have put a name to the faces is boxed up in the ground alongside them and if not nameless as well will soon be so. So. Who are they? The fact that they once walked about in the nomenclative mode is small comfort. Small comfort to whom? Well shit. You just throw up your hands. You dont have to have a name you say. Okay. Dont have to have a name in order to what?

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. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

The best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.

I inherited him from my grandfather. My family had a carnival. He was one of the acts. My grandfather died and the parrot hasnt spoken since. Sort of like my grandfather's clock.

Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Words are immortal - Elinor

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page

Ves esos nombres? -preguntó señalando las letras cinceladas que hablaban de personas ya desaparecidas-. Detrás de cada nombre hay una familia, una madre o un padre, hermanos, acaso una esposa. Si uno de ellos averiguara que es capaz de despertar esas letras a la vida, que podría volver a ser de carne y hueso lo que ahora es únicamente un nombre, ¿no crees que él o ella harían todo lo posible por conseguirlo?

Lady Cora,' he said, 'sometimes one has to do things which are unpalatable. When great issues are involved one can't toy with the situation in silk gloves. No. We are making history.' Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

The statue showed a man with a pile of books behind him. His name was Nicolò Tommaseo, but everyone in the city just call him the Book Man.

Although it's not just plants and animals that die out, so do books. Quite often, I'm sorry to say. I'm sure you could fill a hundred houses like this one to the roof with all the books that have disappeared forever.