Quotes About Legacy

As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself. He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came.

And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.

But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

I recently attended a meeting at which an agricultural economist argued that there is no essential difference between owning and renting a farm. A farmer stood up in the audience and replied: "Professor, I don't think our ancestors came to America in order to rent a farm.

The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

the modern world abounds with heralds of a better future and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeats was silly like us or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress--and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please.

I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandfather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs.

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably.

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

Mat felt the change upon himself. Now he was the oldest, and the longest memory was his. Now between him and the grave stood no other man. From here on he would find the way for himself.

The man of whom I once was pleased to say, "He is my grandfather," has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time.

When my grandfather was dying, I was not thinking about the past. My grandfather was still a man I knew, but as he subsided day by day he was ceasing to be the man I had known. I was experiencing consciously for the first time that transformation in which the living, by dying, pass into the living, and I was full of grief and love and wonder. And so when I

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

Both past and future were disappearing from them, the past because nobody would remember it, the future because nobody could imagine it.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past.

when the atrocities a person has lived through are passed over in silence for lack of any trace or archive, paying tribute to someone would be a hoax. How do you convey Africa's silences?" Then

Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us. I am still not capable – or rather unwilling – to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere. (on the passing of Amos Vogel, his friend for more than 45 years)