Quotes About Legacy

My mother still thinks of things to do for him. Light church candles, name a star, send money to somewhere.

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.

When you die, there is nothing--only a life that will be forgotten. -from Gathering Ashes

Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.

As death approaches, memory erodes. Recent memories are the first to succumb. Death works its way backward until it reaches memory's earliest beginnings. Then memory flares up for an instant, just like a flame about to go out. That is the 'prayer in the mother tongue.' -from A Prayer in the Mother Tongue

He must have made that before he died.

Ce II siècle m'interesse parce qu'il fut, pour un temps fort long, celui des derniers hommes libres. Ence qui nous concerne, nous sommes peut-être déjà fort loin de ce temps-là.

I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past.

And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.

all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

There's never any knowing—how am I to put it?—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. —E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.

A different kind of history from my mother's, the kind that is barely written down—that is felt.

Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several small items made her cry: a tiny woollen bootie, a broken orthodontic retainer, a woggle from a cub-scout tie. She had not become Malcolm X's private secretary. She never did direct a movie or run for the Senate. She could not fly a plane. But here was all this.

They were touched by the same inheritance.

I didn't know what to do with all of the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said.

Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy.

I got a few gray hairs to testify to my wisdom, 2 grand babies & long. black dido named Harry...