Quotes About Legacy

The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.

The only good writer was a dead writer.

Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.

All we got is the family unbroke.

Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.

He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it. Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life.

Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

That was a time when a man had the right to be burried by his own son an' a son had the right to burry his own father.

We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

When you see good or bad in your children, you're seeing what you instilled in them after they cleared the womb.

but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours- being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror

That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

Casy said solemnly, This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter...

This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk. Maybe both of us have got a piece of him, said Lee. Maybe that's what immortality is.

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people.

The great artists of finance like Morgan and Rockefeller weren't deflected. They wanted and got money, just simple money. What they did with it afterward is another matter. I've always felt they got scared of the ghost they raised and tried to buy it off.

I don't very much believe in blood," said Samuel. "I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb." "You can't make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

We in the United States have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our land, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity.

And in our time, when a man dies--if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man's property and his eminence and works and monuments--the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?--which is another way of putting Croesus's question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris

That is the way it is done, the way it has always been done. Frogs have every right to expect it will always be done that way.

so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

Thank God this man has no message. Thank God he has no will to be remembered, to be believed in." And, in sudden heresy, "else there might be a new Christ here in the West.