Quotes About Legacy

I don't want to pull a Brahe.

Nancy Mairs, in Remembering the Bone House

You take the shit; you make an art of it; then, you die.

Have a nice life and an even nicer afterlife.

If books could kill, I would have written more of them before I died.

Whitney, My Love is the story of Clayton Westmoreland, the Ninth Duke of Claymore. Until You features Stephen Westmoreland's

You are transformed into one of the gypsy ancestors we have never discussed.

Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way, he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, He certainly did. John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview. (Andrew Johnson couldn't read until he was fourteen! He didn't learn to write until after he was married!)

My mother named me Deenie because right before I was born she saw a movie about a beautiful girl named Wilmadeene, who everybody called Deenie for short.

Every generation relearns the rules its fathers have forgotten. One rule is awareness, the need to see past the power of human hands on the land, to the power beneath it. Those who forget have the wind to jog their memory, wind slipping evenly through the sage, dusting across the fields. Watch your back, it's whispering. This land owes you nothing.

Our lives, and even our afterlives, are made from the stories we tell each other. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

It's unseemly to be late to your own funeral.

Nick, go get ready for your funeral.

Alexander and Caesar have had this in common: to be loved and wept by the conquered, and to perish by the hands of their own countrymen. Such men have no country; they belong to the world.

Sometimes the dying live more fiercely and wisely than the rest of us. (146)

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad, and that's why I call you dad, because you are so special to me. You taught me the game and you taught me how to play it right.

The truest evidence that any civilization ever leaves behind about itself is its art. Art never lies.

I'm very proud of my Nigerian heritage. I wasn't fortunate enough to be raised in a heavy Nigerian environment, because my parents were always working. My father was with D.C. Cabs and my mother worked in fast food and was a nurse.

Die knowing something. You're not here long.

Maximus said, "They have no tombstones. Not one man in Treverorum wept for their passing." he looked at his audience in turn and smiled. "In the name of Mithras, my master, may the gods be kind to you on your journey.

But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.

We are fossils in the making.