Quotes About Legacy

In the history of mothers there had certainly been better, but in fairness to history there had most certainly been worse.

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can't begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren't.

A tree Cannot grow In its parents' shadows.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself. What is left of it now, what it has become, I do not know.

Could she give Doro what he wanted—what she herself had wanted for so long—children who would not die?

I would like to give them a grove of oak trees, I said. Trees are better than stone- life commemorating life.

This could be a great time to live in," Kevin said once. "I keep thinking what an experience it would be to stay in it—go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true.

We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.

Barbara County. My grandparents' maps helped us explore away from

No feeling was better than that of being surrounded by her own. Her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A tree Cannot grow In its parents' shadows.

In order for me to understand who I am, I must begin to understand who she was. That is my reason for writing and assembling this book. It has always been my way to sort through my feelings by writing.

First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died.

Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your good health has vanished.

The reason for much matrimony is patrimony.

I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.

So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it, And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it, And the fetters gave him welts, And they named America after somebody else.

Senescence begins And middle-age ends The day your descendants Outnumber your friends

Yet we allow our historical sympathy to override our aesthetic discrimination. We offer flowers of approbation when the artist is safely laid in his grave.

Someday he would write his memoirs, when his adventures had arranged themselves into a suitably attractive package.

What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces.

Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.

What is life, after all if not dancing on graves?

Perhaps one could get used to it? Learn to live with it, just as people live in the cities of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, without ever thinking about what happened there in the past. They simply live their lives.