Quotes About Legacy

responsible for some of the most

Elizabeth Peters

No one in this world comes from nothing.

Her great dead friends did not seem worth reading that night. They always said the same things now—over and over again they said the same things, and nothing new was to be got out of them any more for ever. No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?

No children, that is. Ernest, in the matter of posterity, had been a blind alley, a cul-de-sac. Strange and sad not to go on in any way, to come to a dead stop.

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

Kiss me, Hardy!' Weren't those Nelson's last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don't cry. We're still alive and we make a sensational team.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.

And then, if I die anytime soon, at least they'll be able to say that I led a productive life and did all my work on time. I may be dead, but I'll be up to date in Space, Time, and Motion.

But now, years later, I must admit that unhappiness seems to run in the family, there have been so many generations of it on my dad's side that I wonder why someone doesn't just put a stop to it. I don't know why someone doesn't throw a big black umbrella over our heads and pull us all out of the rain.

But now, years later, I must admit that unhappiness seems to run in the family, there have been so many generations of it on my dad's side that I wonder why someone doesn't just put a stop to it. I don't know why someone doesn't throw a big black umbrella over our heads and pull us all in out of the rain.

Years later, thinking about this conversation, I will remember, as somebody very sagely said during the patricide trials of the Menendez brothers: Anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame .

Death is senseless yet makes way for the living.

Today I have gathered together my nearest and dearest, my sixteen nieces and nephews (Sit down, Grace Windsor Wexler!) to view the body of your Uncle Sam for the last time. Tomorrow its ashes will be scattered to the four winds. I, Samuel W. Westing, hereby swear that I did not die of natural causes. My life was taken from me–by one of you!

Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.

Steinbeck wasn't the thirties and Dickens wasn't the eighteen-hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they're out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap.

you can drop those 'a'ints' too. It ain't 'acting white' to speak your own language properly. People fought for you to get the best possible education. It would break your grandpa's heart to hear you talk like nothing had changed.

Some who thus take fire burn to the day of their death, and set light to many others, leaving a trail of radiance to generations to come. Other fires sink for want of fuel, but do no harm to any. Time would discover what young Meriet's small, desperate flame portended.

Robert Beaumont, earl of Leicester

for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a "mummified" form.