Quotes About Legacy

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Mind the time when you would be lying before your family members, and there would be no physician to stop it (death), and no friend to benefit you.

Live amongst people in such a manner that if you die they weep over you and if you are alive they crave for your company.

Socialize with people in such a manner that when you die, they should weep for you, and as long as you live, they should long for your company.

In all their colonies, wealth, power, and beauty were the property of the white elite and the lighter-skinned children of intermarriages and illegal liaisons between white male colonizers and local women.

the sins of slavery are given short shrift.

And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.

Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

Regrets when you're dead? A past when you're dead? Is there never any escaping the junkyard of the self?

An idiolect. That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He's been too blithe, he'd forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

human beings can't be legends, being mortal

Midge, inimioara mea dulce È™i cumplit de cinic?, spune bunicul. Va trebui s? înveÈ›i acel tip de speran?? care transform? lucrurile în istorie. Altfel, n-o s? existe vreo È™ans? pentru propriile tale adev?ruri m?reÈ›e, È™i nici un adev?r bun pentru proprii t?i nepoÈ›i.

there's nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which s what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we're here or don't. So. While we're here. I mean, while we're still here.

You're going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there'll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.

If death be the last thing I do, why, I pray the gods and heroes of my people that I try to do it as well as I have done more pleasant things.

I remember attending a Friars roast for Muhammad Ali when Don Rickles grabbed me and walked me up to Sinatra. "Hey, Frank," he said to the Chairman of the Board, "tonight I'm sitting with this guy. You know why? Because he fills up baseball stadiums! You play bars." Frank laughed and waved him off, with me standing there silently. Soon

Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.

Facts. I was taken down to see the place, The family place in Devon--and John's mother. "Of course, you understand," he said, "my brother Will have the place." He smiled; he was so sure The world was better for primogeniture. And yet he loved that place, as Englishmen

How old, how commonplace To look upon the face Of your first-born, and glory in your lot. To look upon his face And understand your place Among the unknown dead in churchyards lying, To see the reason why You lived and why you die-- Even to find a certain grace in dying.

Don't Dare take your college as a matter of course- because like freedom and democracy, many people you'll never know anything about have broken their hearts to get it for you.

The Bouviers and the Lees alike operated within the great American tradition of immigrant ambition, which held that in making yourself anew, you had the right to embellish the past.

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!