Quotes About Legacy

History is not just about the things we like or the people we want to love and admire—a fantasy date with our favorite dead person.

the past is never dead. It's not even past.

And she's certainly a good cook." Miss Betts sighed. "The epitaph of the spinster.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

To dust is only to forestall burial

Write as if you were dying.

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?

Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.

Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved-over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of themselves behind. The world was haunted by the past.

By now, Tally understood that nothing in the Smoke ever lost its value. Nothing was discarded or given away just because it was old or broken.

We're all made stories.

One faces the future with one's past. —Pearl S. Buck

Well, well, imperfect gods." Tally allowed herself a chuckle. "What would your father say, Andrew?" He shook his head. "I am not sure. But he isn't here. I am the holy man now.

I read that the real Cleopatra wasn't even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was." "Yeah, right. And you've seen a picture of her?" "They didn't have cameras back then, Squint." "Duh. So how do you know she was ugly?" "Because that's what historians wrote at the time.

I'm far too intelligent to not know that there will be time when I won't be 33 anymore, when I won't be that pretty anymore, I won't be sparkly anymore, and I'll be tired. I want to be able to know that I can still have fun and be part of the world, and that I didn't give it all away for Fleetwood Mac.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than her, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality.

The six other members of the Traitorous Eight bought shares, and Robert Noyce saw to it that his small alma mater, Grinnell College, was invited to participate.

Los buenos actos resuenan a nuestro paso, mucho tiempo después de que hayamos olvidado haberlos realizado.

The best way to be missed when you're gone, Is to stand for something when you're here

One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium.