Quotes About Legacy

The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage.

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers; and only someone with a mind like Shelley's can write Prometheus Unbound. The deliberate forger has little chance with his contemporaries and none at all with posterity.

Success and cynicism are not only achieved; they are also inherited.

And as on Tullia's tomb one lamp burned clear, Unchanged for fifteen hundred year...' He repeated the lines to himself, and was desolated to think of all the murdered past.

he was succeeded by his grandson, who was an ass ? but made up for it by being shortlived.

It's going to happen, and one's a fool if one doesn't prepare for it. (About death)

We shall all be 'was' one of these days. Meanwhile....

Llorar sobre los errores literarios de veinte años atrás, intentar enmendar una obra fallida para darle la perfección que no logró en su primera ejecución, perder los años de la madurez en el intento de corregir los pecados artísticos cometidos y legados por esta persona ajena que fue uno mismo en la juventud, todo ello, sin duda, es vano y futil.

There was much of Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne, perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of ten generations the living had left but few traces.

Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious old writer (one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down to us), George Bernard Shaw, who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own genius.

Spode hurried away for counsel to Badgery House. Lord Badgery surprisingly rose to the occasion. Ask Boreham to come and see me, he told the footman, who answered his ring. Boreham was one of those immemorial butlers who linger on, generation after generation, in the houses of the great. He was over eighty now, bent, dried up, shrivelled with age.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are re-discovered by every succeeding generation, its values re-assessed, its meanings re-defined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations.

Nothing is more dead and dated than the book which once caused controversy.

You're never really done for, as long as you've got a good story and someone to tell it to.

There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier.

Esta misteriosa circunstancia de que las cosas de nuestro pasado sigan existiendo incluso cuando salen del radio de acción de nuestras vidas y que es más, maduran, trayendo frutos nuevos en cada estación, para una recolección de la que nosotros ya no sabemos nada más. La persistencia ilógica de la vida.

Mourir et donner des noms, on ne fait sans doute rien de plus sincère, pendant tout le temps où on vit.

WESSON: Volare giù dalle cascate e non morire... nessuno lo dice, ma qui è il sogno di tutti. SMITH: Ma da quando? WESSON: Da sempre. Noi campiamo delle cascate, ma loro fanno quel che vogliono. L'unico modo sarebbe quello di entrarci dentro e uscirne vivi. E' da sempre che ci aspettiamo che qualcuno lo faccia. SMITH: Sono cinquanta metri che finiscono nell'inferno, Wesson! WESSON: Sì, ma una strada c'è. Me l'ha insegnata mio padre.

Ci disarma, infatti, l'inclinazione a pensare che la nostra vita sia, innanzitutto, un frammento conclusivo della vita dei nostri genitori, solo, affidato alla nostra cura. Come se ci avessero incaricato, in un momento di stanchezza, di tenere un attimo quell'epilogo per loro prezioso; ci si aspettava da noi che lo restituissimo, prima o poi, intatto. L'avrebbero poi ricollocato a posto, formando la rotondità di una vita completa, la loro.

Lo que era para nosotros, lo hemos hecho, y vos lo sabéis. Creedme: lo hemos hecho para siempre.

così, senza saperlo, ereditiamo l'incapacità verso la tragedia, e la predestinazione alla forma minore del dramma.

Still today, in the lands of Carewall, they all relate that trip. Each in his own way. All without ever having seen it. But it doesn't matter. They will never stop talking about it. So that no one can ever forget how beautiful it would be if, for every sea that awaits us, there were a river for us. And someone capable of taking us by the hand and of finding that river -imagine it, invent it- and of depositing us on its current, with the lightness of a single word, goodbye.

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.