Quotes About Legacy

Now the elm chest is carried towards the chapel, where the flags have been lifted so she can go in by the corpse of her brother, George Boleyn. "They shared a bed when they were alive," Brandon says, "so it's fitting they share a tomb. Let's see how they like each other now.

the lawyers' saying 'Le mort saisit le vif'? The dead grip the living. The prince dies but his power passes at the moment of his death, there is no lapse, no interregnum

You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.

What for do we nail down the dead?

If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.

And so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered.

When you become a great man, you meet kinsfolk you never knew you had.

Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God's light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always

The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

John More, Gregory Cromwell, what have we done to our sons? Made them into idle young gentlemen—but who can blame us for wanting for them the ease we didn't have?

Elijah told Ahab that the dogs would lick his blood, and so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered

If a king cannot have a son, if he cannot do that, it matters not what else he can do. The victories, the spoils of victory, the just laws he makes, the famous courts he holds, these are as nothing.' It is true. To maintain the stability of the realm: this is the compact a king makes with his people. If he cannot have a son of his own, he must find an heir, name him before his country falls into doubt and confusion, faction and conspiracy. And who can Henry name, that will not be laughed

Be reasonable, my lord. Once you.ve done it, you'll want to do it all the time. For about three years. That's the way it goes. And your father has other work in mind for you.

Family name and paternity are two different things, but but one must start somewhere.

Men, it is supposed, want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quarter of what he knows.

Our possessions outlast us, surviving shocks we cannot; we have to live up to them, as they will be our witnesses when we are gone.

So many words,' Gregory says. 'So many words and oaths and deeds, that when folk read of them in time to come they will hardly believe such a man as Lord Cromwell walked the earth. You do everything. You have everything. You are everything. So I beg you, grant me an inch of your broad earth, Father, and leave my wife to me.

occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day;

Bawling, strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the infant's fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don't come back, to quibble or correct.

The living result of the queen's labors is the diminutive Mary—not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one.

If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey's creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. Look at Norfolk, already he is sixty, his father was seventy when he fought at Flodden. And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?

he kissed the infant's fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children if each generation does not improve on what went before.