Quotes About Legacy

To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

We immortals aren't misers - we don't hoard! Such things are pointless.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother's. I've passed them on. Decades ahead, you'll study your own temporary hands, and you'll remember. Don't cry, this is what happens.

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.

though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?

After we're gone the work of our knives will survive this.

To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter—if she'd lived, as I'd grown older).

And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.

They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumbles away, computers could be destroyed. Only the spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn't a thing.

You will flicker in these words and in the words of others for a while and then go out. Even if I send them, you will never get these letters. Even if I see you again, I will never see you again.

The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.

Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.

In ten years, you'll be on a stamp / where anyone at all can lick you.

Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?

Hang on to the words, he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral / though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.