Quotes About Legacy

America destroys her big houses. Some them don't even last a hundred years.

They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.

He was a boy dying here whom few would remember except for me.

If I failed tonight, I would be another legend.

The Mayfairs, what are they to me? And what is a great family, a rich family?

Manfred was the patriarch, and William was his son. William begat Gravier. Gravier begat Pops. And Pops, late in life when he and Sweetheart had despaired of having a child, begat Patsy. At age sixteen, Patsy gave birth to me and named me Tarquin Anthony Blackwood. As to my father, let me state now plainly and unequivocally that I don't have one. "Patsy

What tribe on earth has not had elders? How much of our art and our knowledge comes from those who've lived into old age? You sound like Lestat when you say such things, speaking of his Savage Garden. The world has never seemed a hopelessly savage place to me.

Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the Hittites, father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years.

ancestor, and the combination was

mother into leaving twelve and a half million dollars to the Foundation of Being. And not a damned thing to the only child she'd ever had. Ten years ago Rachel might

It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end.

But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them.

I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.

dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such?

The trouble with dying is you don't get to stay around and see how everything turns out.

We live such tangled, fraught lives, he thought, but in the end we die like all the other animals and we're buried in the ground and after a few years we might as well not have existed. This should have depressed him, but instead it made him feel better. The light turned green and he started driving again.

The trouble with dying is you don't get to see how everything turns out. You don't know the ending.

It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.

Oh, a French braid," Greta said. "That's it. And then when she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples, little leftover squiggles, for hours and hours afterward." "Yes…" "Well," David said, "that's how families work, too. You think you're free of them, but you're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever." Greta started laughing.

He had been forty-three years old—too young to think of making funeral plans. So all of that was left to Willa

Same for the photos on the facing page: two little girls crammed into an armchair with a puppy, and a baby whose vast bouffant christening gown seemed to be wearing him rather than the other way around. There were no captions. Once the subjects' identities must have seemed so obvious; it hadn't occurred to the album's creator that the time would come when no one alive remembered them.

Or maybe it wasn't a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

The trouble with dying," she'd told Jeannie once, "is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending." "But, Mom, there is no ending," Jeannie said. "Well, I know that," Abby said. In theory.

Founder's Chic: Our Reverence for the Founding Fathers Has Gotten out of Hand, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2003.