Quotes About Legacy

For Jean Dennis and in memory of John Dennis Prologue

the past/that has a place for us will know us by our scattered wake." A History Play, Waterborne

I saw her future in my body and face, and her past was alive in me.

Walking by Stolen Creek the meaning of its name forgotten, the word remembered. Whatever happened here is recalled in another time and it's remembered inside the stolen self that my blood river passes through in thin and beautiful veins, not gold but only a mere human heartbeat, a circle of people standing, talking, making their plans as water passes by. Something, someone is still alive, telling. They think these are only stories not what holds the world together in its balance.

We are those who came from the ones who survived, buried in that place after walking the death trail from Mississippi. Missa Sipokna. We walked into this lost foreign place having no homes, no body of peace just the papers with signatures of those who made promises not held.

Je me souviendrai qu'elle m'a écrit par sms, vers la fin : J'ai travaillé. J'ai traduit ce qui meurt en ce qui dure. (Préface de Mathieu Terence, p. 8)

Il y a des écrivains qui réunissent cent mille personnes à leur enterrement et il y a ceux qui n'ont jamais suscité la ferveur que d'une poignée de passeurs, confrérie clandestine dont les membres se transmettent le flambeau d'une génération à l'autre. (p. 143)

But he was bent on making that ride, Brody, and if he hadn't gotten himself thrown that day, he'd have done it some other day. What I'm trying to get at here is that folks seem to come into this life with a list of things they need to get done while they're here inscribed on their souls. Old or young, when their work is done, they leave.

The drumbeat in your blood is the voice of your ancestors. Let the drum speak.

All these years later, people still wonder about how Bruce died. I prefer to remember how he lived.

Meet Madeleine Cahill," he said. "Founder of the Madrigal line.

I always thought it was a shame . . . that we didn't keep those things safe somehow.

A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them?

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.

I want to be remembered for the work that I've done, rather than the car accidents that I've gotten into, the men that I've not dated - or the man that I have.

When I was a kid, I thought movie stars were women and men who were in these great films that we still look at now. But I don't think there are too many films coming out these days that we're going to look at in the future and say, 'This is one of the great ones.'

Archaeology and memory are two ways of trying to retrieve and keep the past, both of them fallible, fascinating and doomed to be incomplete.

When bones and flesh have finished their business together, we lay them carefully, in positions they're willing to keep, and cover them over. Their eyes and ours won't meet anymore. We hope.

Even dead, we bony creatures do our best to leave a mark-- if not a mask of beaten gold or a casket engraved with feathers, perhaps a richer concentration of fungus, a patch where grass is younger and thicker, a sunken place in a field.

Boys chase girls. Women chase men. Men chase history.

Giving is my way of being forgotten and remembered at the same time.

We are all guilty of using the present to create a future that justifies the past.

Help me leave behind some reasons to be missed

In the end, it doesn't even matter.