Quotes About Legacy

I can tell all I want about them now because they are all dead and they won't resent the truth about themselves.

And then—it was very fast, almost a click in the brain—Adam knew that, for him at least, his father's methods had no reference to anything in the world but his father.

We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. "Then we came down to the sea, and it was done." He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. "That's what I should be telling instead of stories." When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him.

Grampa an' the old place, they was jus' the same thing.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he died unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

I thought my blood must survive—my line—but it's not so. My knowledge, yes—the long knowledge remembered, repeated, the pride, yes, the pride and warmth, Mordeen, warmth and companionship and love so that the loneliness we wear like icy clothes is not always there. These I can give.

If only I wouldn't take this book so seriously. It is just a book after all, and a book is very dead in a very short time. And I'll be dead in a very short time too. So the hell with it. Let's slow down, not in pace or wordage but in nerves.

Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.

The church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the little theater.

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. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

Thank you for wanting to honor me with the truth, my son. It's not clever but it's more permanent.

Kiev deve ter sido em tempos uma bela cidade. E agora é pouco mais que uma ruína. Não se tratou de combates, mas sim da destruição demencial de todas as instalações culturais que a cidade tinha, e da quase totalidade dos belos edifícios erguidos ao longo de mil anos.

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.

During World War I, Paul Starrett formed Starrett & Goss, which built steamships for the government. By the time Starrett Bros. & Eken was formed in 1922, Paul had already built Macy's to the designs of De Lemos & Cordes; Pennsylvania Station and the Main Post Office to the designs of McKim, Mead & White; and Warren & Wetmore's Biltmore Hotel, where the meeting with the Empire State's directors would decide their fate.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

But cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

God save us from ever ending, though billions have./ The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,/ small beads of ego, bright with appetite,/ whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,/ bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf/ unseen beneath the black unheeding waves.

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinion and even into those of our grandfathers.

We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition — not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.

Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know.