Quotes About Legacy

on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.

It's not so much the contents of the song. It's that the song was still being sung.

a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it," Rex says, "or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become." Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

It is the rarest thing...that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.

First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.

Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

That little rock you're so curious about may have seen Alaric sack Rome; it may have glittered in the eyes of Pharaohs. Scythian queens might have danced all night wearing it. Wars might have been fought over it.

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing.

What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

Styrofoam tombstones around the stage and angles the microwave-box-turned-sarcophagus so the audience can read its epitaph: Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater think.

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it...or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become....How much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

We will call him Omeir. One who lives long.

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.

And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?" She shakes her head. "Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second

That's what the gods do they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.

You'll die of old age, we'll die of climate change.

O take me, take me up into the ranks so that I do not die a common death! I do not want to die in vain, what I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.

We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth.