Quotes About Legacy

Welcome to the most important work you'll ever do.

When I die, I want to die like my grandmother who died peacefully in her sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in her car.

Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.

You will be remembered for causing the greatest war of your time.

Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name. Wicked daughters are firebrands, blackening the family's fame.

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

What is the most wondrous thing on earth? Each day countless humans enter the Temple of Death, yet the ones left behind continue to live as though they were immortal.

People revered his father as the Lion of Punjab, but his mother is the one they should have called Lioness.

I long to stretch out on the sofa, wrapping myself in the red quilt that's lying there. Then, with a stab, I recognize the quilt. My father had brought it back from a business trip he took to New England long ago. Ironic, how objects remain in your life long after people have exited.

Daughter and mother, mother and daughter. Though we would like to think otherwise, how our lives echo each other's.

Such rulers were adored by the citizens they protected, but often their families had to bear the brunt of sacrifice.

For the sake of my daughters in the centuries to come, I must now stand up against this unjust action you are asking of me.

Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name.

You are a daughter of independence, the country's future. Women like you are the ones for whom we fought and died, the ones who will transform India. You must carry the flag forward. You may fall from time to time. We all did. What is important is to get up again.

Behold, we give you this girl, a gift beyond what you asked for. Take good care of her, for she will change the course of history.

So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life.

The grandfather dropped his weapons and knelt before him. On his face was a look I could only interpret as hope. "And have you come to set me free finally, Govinda?" he asked.

I wonder if the story (though not intended as such by my aunt) is a warning for me, a preview of my own life which I thought I had fashioned so cleverly, so differently from my mother's, but which is only a repetition, in a different raga, of her tragic song. Perhaps it is like this for all daughters, doomed to choose for ourselves, over and over, the men who have destroyed our mothers.

This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.

In the old country my mother planted flowers in the face of my father's disdain. In every garden, in every house, no matter how long we lived there. I think it was the war, the Blitz in England, that took all the flowers. I think it was for the love she couldn't show him. I think it was for me. To show me that only the unspeakable remains.

See you spend your whole life fighting with your father and no time on making your own life. What will you do when he dies? Fight yourself?

But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.

You live long enough, every day is the anniversary of some thing.

seventy-six-year-old Professor Liviu Librescu, but he was from a different generation. He sacrificed himself by holding the door while ordering his students to escape through the windows. He understood the responsibilities of leadership — the leader, like the captain of a ship, saves himself last.