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Quotes About Legacy

Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.
~ David Foster Wallace
It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way.
~ David Foster Wallace
Ten un padre cuyo propio padre perdió lo que estaba ahí. Ten un padre que cumplió su propia promesa y luego encontró una cosa tras otra y superó las expectativas de su propia promesa y no pareció estar mucho más feliz ni más seguro que su propio padre fracasado, dejándote en una especie de estado salvaje y de encrucijada de flujos con respecto al talento.
~ David Foster Wallace
It's a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.
~ David Foster Wallace
I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.
~ David Foster Wallace
that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away.
~ David Foster Wallace
Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.
~ David Foster Wallace
Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
~ David Foster Wallace
Otro legado de infancia: cuando a su cuerpo le sucedía algo doloroso o desagradable, Skip Atwater a menudo tenía la extraña impresión de que él no era de hecho un cuerpo que ocupaba espacio sino más bien una zona de espacio en sí en forma de cuerpo, impenetrable pero vacío, dotado de esa sensación vacua y estruendosa que asociamos con el espacio vacío.
~ David Foster Wallace
Orin, Mario, and Hal's late father was revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but also, as far as Mario's concerned, ultimately all right, if that's the way things unfolded.
~ David Foster Wallace
A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous object.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray
To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray
Mary, la hija, pasó la infancia viendo su nombre escrito sobre ua tumba. Una madre desconocida - que llevaba su mismo nombre- había muerto al darla a luz, y eso la llevó a cavilar la vida entera sobre los misterios del naiemiento, y sobre la asombrosa proximidad que hay entre la vida y la muerte. Se sentía parida por la tumba, una tumba ella misma, y su nombre y su epitafio tallados sobre una piedra gris la persiguieron en la luz y en la sombra.
~ William Ospina
For nearly all, there is a source of inner peace that comes with the belief that something of you goes on even if death is indeed the final ending. If not personal immortality, at least children and grandchildren or
~ William R. Forstchen
lives that you have touched will remember you after you are gone and be thankful that you had shaped their lives for the better. There is even some source of comfort, with thoughts of a tearful memorial service filled with words of love and thankfulness that you had been part of their lives that
~ William R. Forstchen
Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.
~ William Saroyan
But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.
~ William Saroyan
Whatever neutrality is, it is not very useful to anybody, and time is running out. If we do not do useful things whenever it is possible or necessary to do them, we shall soon be totally departed from the human scene, and forgotten, or remembered only for having disappeared. Armenians are too vital to be permitted to throw themselves away in neutrality, comfort, well-being, satisfaction, and so on and so forth.
~ William Saroyan
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
~ William Saroyan
The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.
~ William Saroyan
The person of a man may leave—or be taken away—but the best part of a good man stays. It stays forever. Love is immortal and makes all things immortal. But hate dies every minute.
~ William Saroyan
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.
~ William Shakespeare
No legacy is so rich as honesty.
~ William Shakespeare
Make death proud to take us.
~ William Shakespeare