Quotes About Legacy

I want to be the best leadoff hitter of our time.

When you learn about someone, hear their stories, you tote them around. They flow in your blood and your dreams. They become a part of you.

When this you see, remember me, And bear me in your mind. Let all the world say what they may. Speak of me as you find Ã¢â'¬Â¦ —Elizabeth Diane Downs, 1983

You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms...

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother...When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone.

My mother spoke, alive again inside my brain...She spoke and I listened to her, because I was afraid if I didn't her voice would gradually fade away, an evanescent wraith of a thing that would narrow to a pinpoint of light and then go out, lost forever, like the Tinker Bell if no one clapped for her.

and when nanas die they leave grandchildren and perhaps a trace memory of being coddled, kissed, attended to, and loved, of being chased across the lawn or rocked in the middle of the night or taken seriously. In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

It's a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.

Some people measure their success by the profession their children have chosen, by the purchase of a house, by how often they visit or call. But the only measurement, truly, is something that's quite subjective: have you raised good people?

It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg's—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

It's hard to imagine yourself in the future. It's why people do so many dumb things, because they're mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.

I don't care that much about getting older, but I don't want to be forgotten, because to be remembered is to live and to be loved.

Life is short. Remember that, too.

Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

Writing is the gift of your presence forever.

When she got older, my mother, who was not a sentimental type at all, started to play around with poems. They weren't very good poems, but at every occasion she would write a poem and give it to us. And those are completely and utterly treasured." Her voice soft and warm and a little plaintive, she added, "Writing is the gift of your presence forever.

And don't you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn't that argue for doing that yourself, no matter how terrifying or impossible writing may sometimes seem? It doesn't really matter what you say. It matters that you said it.

The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.

It is interesting to discover how many people are disconcerted not because their parents are bad grandparents but because they are better grandparents than they were mothers and fathers.

And, above all, becoming a grandparent offers a chance to love in a different way, a love without the thorny crown of self-interest. I wish I could say I loved my children that way, but it wouldn't be true, and it wouldn't be true of anyone I know, either.

No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.