Quotes About Legacy

There are and always will be thousands of princes, but there is only one Beethoven!

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. "You're destined to do small great things," she told me. "Just like Dr. King said." She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

I do not have the money anymore. It was all yours, after all. I slipped the check into the silk lining of the coffin when I kissed you good-bye for the last time.

If you hid long enough, a ghost among men, you might disappear forever without anyone noticing. It's human nature to ensure that someone has seen the mark you left behind.

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

Something still exists as long as there's someone still around to remember it.

Inside was my father's wallet, his reading glasses, his wedding ring. Identity, insight, heart: the only things we leave behind.

In the wild, a calf under the age of two will not survive without its mother. In the wild, a mother's job is to teach her daughter everything she will need to know to become a mother herself. In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies.

Following my mother's footsteps was the surest way out.

Las cosas existen mientras haya quien que las recuerde.

Everyone's surprised by death. Which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. It's not exactly a spoiler. But I think that what really shocked me is how many people can't see the shape of the life they've lived until they get to the very end of it.

I'm a daughter from a strong man and beautiful mommy, and I'm so proud to be I am.

The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades.

A song can last long after the events and people in it are dust and dreams and gone.

Si le das el corazón a alguien y luego muere, ¿se lo lleva consigo?

As long as I remembered them, then they were still here.

THEY PUT ME IN CHAINS. Just like that, they shackle my hands in front of me, as if that doesn't send two hundred years of history running through my veins like an electric current. As if I can't feel my great-great-grandmother and her mother standing on an auction block. They put me in chains, and my son—who I've told, every day since he was born, You are more than the color of your skin—my son watches.

When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd's collective memory.

See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn't get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.

It's not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.

I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. "But," she continued, "don't forget where you came from.

Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense? I