Quotes About Legacy

In the end, what will matter is how much we loved—our children, our mates, our families, our friends, everyone we knew, everyone who traveled with us during our brief visit to this unbearably lovely place. What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.

the same secret we will all know when death is just a breath away: In the end, what will matter is how much we loved—our children, our mates, our families, our friends, everyone we knew, everyone who traveled with us during our brief visit to this unbearably lovely place. What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.

No plough iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,' Henry said.

Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.

Aunt Helen Beck had many intentions about her death. She was about being dead the way some people are about being British - she wasn't, and it seemed she would never be, but it was clearly something she aspired to, since all the people she respected were.

When I'd asked her about what she might like to happen after she died, she said, "I plan to die on trash night, so I can be put out in a Hefty bag." Also, she was a cheapskate: She disapproved of spending on the dead what could go to the living.

Dad hated those people so inconsiderate as to move in, move out, never making a noise, a scene, a mark, a complaint. A good story when you left was the only rent he insisted on.

For instance, it is a scientific fact that she shares his genes. We live in his house, among his possessions. And in every way his the one who brought her to me, which is one of reasons I love her-though much to my misanthropic amazement, not the only reason. He was my one, true husband and love, and he would have loved her best....

What a thing, to marry into a family! What could be more perilous? And yet people did it all the time. They married and had children, every child a portmanteau, a mythical beast, a montage.

The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They're listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.

She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body's factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.

i just want my girls to have babies. that's all. so they know what i know.

She became a story, one I have mostly forgotten. One I can't end because she died a long time ago.

Of the twelve Caesars of the first century CE, six were bloodily assassinated, or were forced to commit suicide, at least two of them in their own palaces in Rome. A further three were the subject of lurid posthumous rumours as to the manner of their deaths, and of the remaining three, only one ruled for more than two years.

Greeks were so much a part of the Roman world that, in the surviving texts, they are often more visible by the shadow they cast than by their actual written presence.

The earliest and most abiding influence on Hadrian was his love of Greece. It is here, and with Hadrian's intention to create a new golden age, that the uniqueness of his reign and legacy begins.

He built public buildings in all places and without number, but he inscribed his own name on none of them except the temple of his father Trajan. At Rome he restored the Pantheon, the voting enclosure, the Basilica of Neptune, very many Temples, the forum of Augustus, the baths of Agrippa . . . Also he constructed the bridge named after himself, a tomb on the bank of the Tiber and the temple of the Bona Dea.

no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father's ambitions.

oh, I can't really explain what I thought! But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from.

And what I most remember was that this guy told us that—because we are in the middle of it—we will not live long enough to see how it plays out in this world.

How is it that some people know how to do this, and others, like me, still give off the faint smell of what we came from? I would like to know. I will never know. Catherine, with her own scent that she always wore.

But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from. And from what Catherine had come from as well. I don't know why this came to me with such force at that moment, but it did.

And I thought how when William came into money from his grandfather who had profited from the war, and Catherine was still alive at that time, she had said very little about it. But she did say to me, lying on the tangerine couch, not long after this had happened, "It's dirty money. He should give it all away." But William did not give it all away; he became very rich.

No matter the difficulty, no matter the danger. He inspire them like no other since or before.