Quotes About Legacy

Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or inquire into the present or the future."7

Cain wonders what his father had made of him at this age. The idea is startling, that he and his father might have such things in common as pleasures and annoyances of parenthood. Seldom has he let himself consider the world through his father's eyes.

There are worse fates than being forgotten.

He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.

Now as I began to sort through his "effects" it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.

However the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with him now til his last breath.

Even the memory then, of what once was, will have grown dim in the minds of a generation who, for the whole of their lives, have known nothing but chaos and lawlessness.

Planeando su Balzac, Rodin llegó a rastrear a un sastre que el novelista había empleado cuarenta años antes; y le encargó un traje con las medidas del muerto.

Jackson Pollock alguna vez fue asistente de David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Anna wanted her daughter to be precisely as she, Anna, was; saving that, a fine reflection. "Eleanor, I hardly know what's to happen to you," she would say, in legend, if not in fact. "You're so plain that you really have nothing to do except be good.

Alexander the Great established the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which become the world center of Hellenistic culture. It was also the site of the largest Jewish urban concentration in the world in antiquity; estimates range from 500,000 to 1 million Jewish residents in the first century ce. Alexandria was not only significant in demographic terms. It was also a site

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

JFK had a way of grabbing grandeur from mishap.

No matter what office LBJ assumed he lifted greater than when he found it.

Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I'm pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.

I don't know that it had anything to do with us," my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn't the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

What's wrong? he said. I'll tell you what's wrong: you're killing us. But I thought that's what you wanted? We did, my mother wept, but not this way. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life's work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.

She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a wealth of hearty field hands destined to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at the sight of our girlish, uncallused hands.

You kids might think you're close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you're left to divide up our property.

Like many good biography subjects, she became a mess toward the end of her life.

My father reminds me that according to Midrash - the ever-evolving commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures - when you arrive in the world as a baby, your hands are clenched, as though to say, Everything is mine. I will inherit it all. When you depart from the world, your hands are open, as though to say, I have acquired nothing from the world.

mater regis ('queen mother')