Quotes About Legacy

he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing.

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names. How else will we be remembered?

There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow ride... to your final place of rest. He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.

It's true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old.

For the dead live only in us.

But Arthur, there is hope.' The great author quietly says: 'We are that fraction of old magic that remains.

Because at funerals, forever is the theme of the day.

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we'd received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.

Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?

She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. 'Don't think you're paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,' she said to me. 'The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.

Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.

I told my mother that she was not going anywhere and that I would remember her for a good long time because she was going to go on reminding me of herself.

A mature childhood can be a recipe for an immature adulthood—a principle most publicly borne out by Michael Jackson.

Why do we think only the dead haunt us, for the living are just as good at it?

Human creativity, then, images God's creativity when it emerges from a lively, loving community of persons and, perhaps more important, when it participates in unlocking the full potential of what has gone before and creating possibilities for what will come later.

Nothing is gained and much is lost when a life spirals into idolatry—no matter how much creative image bearing may also be preserved by the mysterious workings of common grace. Had Jobs been able to turn from his more extreme forms of god playing, his life might have yielded much more, not less, lasting cultural fruit.

The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.

James Dean was the damaged but beautiful soul of our time.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.

Mom always said not to worry about love, but just to be sure to get married. But I always knew that I would never get married, because I don't want any children, I don't want them to have the same problems that I have. I don't think anybody deserves it.

Sean's (Penn) is going to be the new Dustin Hoffman. He'll be around a long time.

Lawless men shrank back for fear of him; all the evildoers were confounded; and deliverance prospered by his hand. He embittered many kings, but he made Jacob glad by his deeds, and his memory is blessed forever. 1 Maccabees

And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.