Quotes About Legacy

Mexico is a country where the temples of the new gods are built on the gravesites of the old.

Shakespeare: "The evil that men do lives after them.

Do you know what history is?" Peter asks. "History?" "Yeah." "I dunno," Frankie says, "it's things that happened." "No," Peter says, "it's what people say happened.

the only redemption for having a bad father is being a good one.

And an epiphany—the only redemption for having a bad father is being a good one.

You don't let them knock you out, you make them knock you out. You make them break their fucking hands knocking you out, you let them know that they've been in a fight, you give them something to remember you by every time they look in a mirror.

The past isn't in the past. It's always with us. In our history. Our minds, our blood.

Some aspects of success seem rather silly as death approaches.

Surely, two of the most satisfying experiences in life must be those of being a grandchild or a grandparent.

The simple question 'What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?' might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?

...as one reads more and more and more you get more fathers in your hierarchy of fathers. And then, after summoning twenty or thirty fathers, perhaps you are born, or perhaps you are not born.

They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff.

Every settlement with two shacks and a saloon gave itself a name: Helltown, Fair Play, Grizzly Flats, Piety Hill, Whiskey Flat, You Bet, Nary Red, Lousy Ravine, Petticoat Slide.

When I was three years old and in my mother's arms, she looked down at me and said, "Son, the way I'm taking care of you now, when you get old, always have a woman to take care of you like this." Dig this! All I'm goin' do is rest and dress, buy gasoline and lean. I'm goin' buy diamond rings and have the best of everything. I'm goin' pimp whores.

Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Generation after generation, my family's old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later.

Doc Colvin Swain was the seventh son of a seventh son, which Ozark tradition indicates as infallibly as the daily setting of the sun that he was destined to become a physician, even in spite of himself.

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.

My biggest fear in life is to be forgotten.

I believe that the measure of a person's life is the affect they have on others.

It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.