Quotes About Legacy

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.

Happiness. One day. Ten thousand years ago.

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged.

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

And you and me in the car where we've always been, where we'll always be, this night, this road, even when we're gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we'll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.

Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There's no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.

There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable.

Your life flashes before you, flash, flash, because there's so little of it. I mean, what have you ever done that was worth doing?

History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries.

I know nothing of my biological parents. They live on a lost continent of DNA. Like Atlantis, all record of them is sunk. They are guesswork, speculation, mythology. The only proof I have of them is myself, and what proof is that, so many times written over? Written on the body is a secret code, only visible in certain lights. I do not know my time of birth. I am not entirely sure of the date. Having brought no world with me, I made one.

She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes were more modest -- but you don't know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.

For myself I will plant a cypress tree and it will outlive me. That's what I miss about the fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly; a shoot, a tree, just when you were looking the other way, thinking about something else. I like to know that life will outlive me, that's a happiness Bonaparte never understood.

Mi madre odiaba ser una don nadie, así que como todos los niños, adoptados o no, he tenido que vivir algunas de las vidas que ella no pudo vivir. Es algo que hacemos por nuestros padres, no tenemos otra opción.

The future id foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial.

She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don't really have any choice

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

Spike came forward and put her arms around me. 'One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

I am not worried about pleasing clever minds or fashionable people. In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that very reason, a freethinker or philosopher today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the League.* One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one's own age.

Alas, it is when we are beginning to leave this mortal body that it most offends us!

Si queremos formar una institución duradera, no pensemos en hacerla eterna

There is, I feel, an age at which an individual man would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that portend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time.