Quotes About Legacy

But people were used to saying "Deerwander" now, without thinking about the name one way or another; they might still be saying "Deerwander" when the village became a city, where children lived who had never seen a deer drinking at a rain pool in a hollow of the granite.

The whistle now resides at the Pratt Institute but used to blow the shift changes at Bethlehem Steel;

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

But after he tells you how they died, I want you to remember how they lived(...)

Her husband was sent to boarding school at an early age and though deprived of his family's presence, their name was always ahead of him, opening every door.

Which is - you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?

I was a bartender for a long time, so I know how to make drinks, but I'm more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did, and why I get to produce more writing than she did, and why my marriage isn't in dire straits.

sudden throb of triumph in Marianne's soul; for this, in spite of all, had been a man who had left the world the richer for his passing through it, and even if immortality were an empty dream, that were sufficient justification for the fact of life. He had lived for the poor and the outcast, he had served them up to the moment of his death, and she in whatever ways she could find would serve them too.

You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?' Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure.

It's only the immortal thing that a man can be judged on, that bit of himself that he makes as he does the best he can with what fate handed out to him.

to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother but must be a Grandmother

She never slept very well because old people never do; especially when they have brought six children and eight grandchildren into a world that is not as good to them as they thought it was going to be.

While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.

Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?

He could contemplate, in a sentimental way, the idea of his wife, children and grandchildren arranged, well-dressed and weeping decorously, around his grave. His lovers, she ten years his junior and a handsome woman, and the lovely immortal, he imagined them disentangling their feet from his ribcage and walking on. It

One biographer summed up Lyell's influence on Darwin as follows: "Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin." Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, "I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains.

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have -or have not- inherited the earth.

hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

all that we consider to be the great works of man - the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories - will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man -- the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories -- will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.