Quotes About Legacy

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.

Your sons have no names." Adam replied, "Their mother left them motherless." "And you have left them fatherless. Can't you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don't you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?" "I didn't do it," Adam said. "Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.

A nation may be moved by its statesmen and defined by its military but it's usually remembered for its artists.

Sure, cried the tenant men, 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.

Act out being alive, like a play. And after awhile, a long while, it will be true... You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.

There was a man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?

Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be -- more rich and meaningful the farther back it was.

You got to have patience. Why, Tom—us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people—we go on.

Maybe you'll come to know that every man in every generation is refired.

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters.

It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.

Grandpa didn't die tonight. He died the minute you took 'im off the place [...] He was that place, an' he knowed it.

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead.

Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: 'Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.

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

And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City.

I don't know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them.

My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know - he will know and through him we will know.

It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world.

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.

I don't want to be forgotten, Henry. That is greater horror to an old man than death--to be forgotten.