Quotes About Legacy

Living so that you beautify your name, even if it wasn't beautiful to begin with … making it stand in people's thoughts for something so lovely and pleasant that they never think of it by itself.

A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.

Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies.

The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other.

In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world.

An ordinary life." Leo smiles in the half dark. "Blood sacrifice!" he yells, startling James. "I came over in nineteen seventy-two; a pioneer, breaking land. I sacrificed myself—all so my sons could be magnificent! I did all this—only to be dog father. Is anyone grateful?

The old fellow gazed out at the empty tent, painted a soft green by the carbide lamps, and at the tables, now missing their tablecloths, and felt utterly desolate, imagining that this is what his funeral would be like: the tent would become a place of mourning, but there would be no dutiful sons or grandsons in mourning attire kneeling before his coffin, nothing but a few casual acquaintances playing mahjong through the night

In all our lives there are hits, strikeouts, and the occasional home run. This book is dedicated to my two young sons, Chance King and his brother Cannon King, two of the cherished home runs of my life.

I don't think people so much wanted to be her as to idolize her and their idea of what she represented—a commoner who became a princess, who then became the princess of the people. I'm glad she lived during my lifetime. The phenomenon of what her life became—I don't think we'll ever see the likes of it again. --Harry Benson

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. —T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.

The thing that Buffalo Hump was most grateful for, as he rode into the emptiness, was the knowledge that in the years of his youth and manhood he had drawn the lifeblood of so many enemies. He had been a great killer; it was his way and the way of his people; no one in his tribe had killed so often and so well. The killings were good to remember, as he rode his old horse deeper into the llano, away from all the places where people came.

Such is the life and death of a good cowboy.

Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I've put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there. -- On Rereading, NYRB July 14, 2005

It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live." ~spoken by Augustus McCrae ? Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

All his work, and it hadn't saved anyone, or slowed the moment of their going by a minute.

He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds. They would figure that someone might need to know those facts; they themselves might not need to, but their children might, or their grandchildren might.

It wasn't merely damage done by the sun that was causing him to slip suddenly into Greek; it was the Scull dementia, damage from the broken seed. His father, Evanswood Scull, intermittently mad but a brilliant linguist, used to stomp into the nursery, thundering out passages in Latin, Greek, Icelandic, and Old Law French, a language which it was said that he was the only man in America to have a thorough mastery

My grandmother is old," Famous Shoes said. "She may want to tell me a few more stories before she dies.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

We rarely hear the names of these early Western photographers now, though they were quite important: Carleton

It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live. Augustus McCrae

Does he know he's your son?" "I suppose he does—I give him my horse," Call said, feeling that it was hell to have her, of all women, talk to him about the matter. "Your horse but not your name?" Clara said. "You haven't even given him your name?" "I put more value on the horse," Call said

Though a Kickapoo, the man had respect for the old ways. He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds. They would figure that someone might need to know those facts; they themselves might not need to, but their children might, or their grandchildren might.