Quotes About Legacy

The gods would be moving on, in other words; and I, a mere mortal, would be left behind, forgotten

You know she wanted you to vote the other way. It's her future, you know. She's the one who's going to be around the longest.

Resolved, that I will live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.

Our culture is an edifice built of external memories, a way of fending off mortality.

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.

There was no arguing with blood.

Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his.

It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who'd stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.

Sometimes, he [Congressmen John Lewis] said, you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe that you will see it in your lifetime, you have got to hold it up so that the generation that comes next will take it from your hands and, in their own time, see it as a goal worth fighting for again.

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

How did her life live itself without her.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do?

I went to my grandmother... and asked her to write a letter. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me. What kind of letter? my grandmother asked. I told her to write whatever she wanted to write. You want a letter from me? she asked. I told her yes. Oh, God bless you, she said.

We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.

I'm telling you all of this because I'll never be your father, and you will always be my child.