Quotes About Legacy

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.

For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.

What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time.

His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page.

books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

but one of the dying's imperatives is to make the living see them. This is nobody's fault, but it is everybody's burden.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.

Antony's children were provided with additional names about this time

now called Alexander Helios (Greek "Sun") and Cleopatra Selene ("Moon").

UNFINISHED BUSINESS 46–44 B.C.

He was about twenty-six when he died

Caesar himself almost certainly did not aim at kingship.

Finally, the princeps wrote (or revised) his will, complex and surprising; it took up two notebooks

The first was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a year younger than Gaius.

He traced his lineage to the splendid, mysterious Etruscan civilization, based in today's Tuscany

Caesar was cremated on the spot.

Caesar was handing Octavius a priceless weapon: his name and his clientela

They greeted him enthusiastically as Caesar's son.

He would accept the legacy, avenge his "father"'s death, and succeed to Caesar's power.

Augustus' signet ring was removed from his finger. His eyes were closed.

Eventually, only one person was left beside the ashes—Julia Augusta, widow and now daughter of the dead princeps.