Quotes About Legacy

He sat looking down at his hands--his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands--his mother's--with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken--expressive--her life written on them. Scars. She had them.

so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son.

divide things equally between both children? If anything should happen to her she is appealing to him to honor this final wish. It is the first letter she has written to her husband in over fifty years, an admission that makes her choke back a tear. Fifty years. The golden jubilee that neither remembered. Fields let for grazing. No more the proud neighing thoroughbreds in the fields, the thoroughbreds on which his hopes centered

a mammy's boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down.

All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done. I find most people spend too much time living as if they're never going to die.

The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the "I," prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors

The names of families are the front doors of history.

Aunt Maud was a schoolteacher during her working life. For forty years she taught in the white public schools in New Orleans. English was her subject, mainly, and in retirement, genealogy became her vocation. She was quiet and inward. Maud never married, she had no children. Our ancestors were her offspring.

Remember that, lad, if you never remember anything else. We all touch each other's lives, for better or for worse. So say the things you have to say to people while you still have the chance.

A person is not really gone until everyone who knew them is gone.

The Bootmakers of Toronto, copyright © 2006 by Edward D. Hoch.

A memory is left when something happens and does not completely un-happen.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely un-happen

HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Edward Gibbon

Instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long

The libraries, which they have inherited from their fathers, are secluded, like dreary sepulchres, from the light of day.

The prospect of gain will urge a rich and gouty senator as far as Spoleto; every sentiment of arrogance and dignity is subdued by the hopes of an inheritance, or even of a legacy; and a wealthy childless citizen is the most powerful of the Romans.

Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire.

the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth

To some people, The Beatles are just Paul McCartney's band before Wings.

Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—

Good historians...have the future in their bones

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?