Quotes About Legacy

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And

Addie: My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead.

final itch-footed destination, and at the same time scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through a thousand miles of wilderness; innocent and gullible, without bowels for avarice or compassion or forethought either, changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey;

Je me rappelais que mon père avait coutume de dire que le but de la vie c'est de se préparer à rester mort très longtemps.

You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity.

Wasn't it just one before?' the old porter said. 'Wasn't one enough then to tell us the same thing all them two thousand years ago:

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

la finalidad de la vida no es otra sino la de aprestarse a estar mucho tiempo muerto.

Babam?n insanlar uzun zaman ölü kalabilmeye haz?rlanmak için yaÅŸarlar dediÄŸi akl?ma geldi.

Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them.

Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn't tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine. (Hinterlands)

Something she'd gotten from Burton

the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall. Downstairs

ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . ." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines.

The floor was covered with a faded, barely legible carpet, its traditional pattern of tanks and helicopters worn to colorless patterns of weft.

Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

People don't remember me. Really. It's not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.

Your father is dying. Drat! said the Prince, That means I shall have to get married.

The new doctors all agreed on various tried-and-true medications, and within forty-eight hours of their coming on the case, the King was dead.