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Quotes About Generations

Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.
~ Wendell Berry
The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.
~ Wendell Berry
I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandfather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs.
~ Wendell Berry
You might be thinking by now that I had a lot of aunts and uncles, but that was just the courtesy of those days; children were not allowed to go around first-naming older people.
~ Wendell Berry
A soul tool is being used to make physical changes that will in future generations enable contact across the bridge.
~ Whitley Strieber
I constantly see old people flushed and excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance in education taken rather too long a stride;
~ Wilkie Collins
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
~ Will Durant
Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageable, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.
~ Will Durant
No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
~ Will Durant
Our windows were dark. The entrance was empty. I walked close to the left wall when I entered, but it was empty: just the stairs curving up into shadows echoes of feet in the sad generations like light dust upon the shadows, my feet waking them like dust, lightly to settle again. I
~ William Faulkner
If the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if martyrs sang in the fire... for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract... their contented and inoffensive lives, why, at such a rate... better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding up.
~ William James
Tiger father begets tiger son.
~ Chinese proverb
Daughter and mother, mother and daughter. Though we would like to think otherwise, how our lives echo each other's.
~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The big difference between the twentysomething and sixtysomething generations is a sense of time. The young believe they have plenty of time, while for older workers time is precious. "Time is running short, and many boomers want work that also offers purpose," says Marc Freedman. "They too want work that gives meaning.
~ Chris Farrell
For Reagan,for his contemporaries, and many in the generations after them, the word Munich was understood as code for any nation's stepping back from necessary toughness
~ Chris Matthews
My grandmother was an actress too. In the thirties and forties she was under contract with Universal Studios. Crazy credits, lots of them. My dad was also under contract with Universal Studios. And my first film was shot on the same stage they both worked on at Universal.
~ Chris Pine
I met my grandfather just before he died, and it was the first time that I had seen Dad with a relative of his. It was interesting to see my own father as a son and the body language and alteration in attitude that comes with that, and it sort of changed our relationship for the better.
~ Christian Bale
It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables.
~ Christina Baker Kline
Unwrapping the leftover currant bread at the Grotes' that evening, I tell them about my party. Mr. Grote snorts. "How ridiculous, celebrating a birth date. I don't even know the day I was born, and I sure can't remember any of theirs," he says, swinging his hand toward his kids. "But let's have that cake.
~ Christina Baker Kline
Taking people away from the land where their families have lived for generations turns out to be politically destabilizing. Americans kind of perfected that model. They just never considered the possibility that it would happen to them, in no small part because of how they had abused that land.
~ Christopher Brown
If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.
~ HELEN DENDY BOSANQUET
My novel is sponsored by Tampax. It's the story of three generations of women and spans three decades. That's a lot of menstruation. So every time a character rides the cotton pogo stick—Voilà! Tampax.
~ Helen Ellis
He had the narrow face and long-legged, hipless figure that Victorian novelists called 'aristocratic'. Basil had seen the same leanness to often in the families of farmers and factory workers to believe that the human bone structure can be altered in a few generations by property and leisure.
~ Helen McCloy
So Harriet maintains her point, which is that joining isn't a question of effort or overextension thereof. You miss your chance to join several generations before birth.
~ Helen Oyeyemi