Quotes About Inheritance

Lanny Budd was the son and grandson and great-grandson of merchants of death; he had been born and reared and educated on money made by the manufacture and sale of instruments of death; he was flying now in a warplane, upon an errand of war, even though he persuaded himself, as men do, that it was one of peace. He asked himself whether man was doomed because he could not deliver himself from the curse of war.

It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at – writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge.

There may be some part of the world – dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones – where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs. Men can do that perhaps in Sweden or Canada.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfatehr could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

Dinah and I were raised to believe money taints ordinary people, obstructs virtue, and makes a fool out of you. So, the inheritance was like a tiger somebody'd left on the doorstep of my house, and I had to figure out something to do with it. Having never seen a tiger up close, I perceived it as strange, frightful, and yet it pricked my curiosity enough to warrant a peek at its big body. But what to do with it?

It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

believe, in St. Augustine,—'Place your hopes in the man from whom you do not inherit.

Marah will come looking for me one day, Kate had said, pressing the journal into my hands. Be with her when she reads it. And my boys… show them these words when they can't remember me.

Grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

She pouted prettily, and he wondered if that was one of the things they taught wealthy young girls at schools like Miss Porter's. If not, it had been passed down from one generation to another as carefully as the secret of fire.

In rooms scented by dust, leather, and stone, she turns in the last of her father's dreams for her - that she will become a writer - she hands it in like an overdue book and takes joy in the words of others.

Sometimes when you open the door to your mother's past, you find your own future.

it's always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present.

Sooner or later, Meg, it's always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present.

for the definition of love she'd handed down to her daughter like a dark incantation.

Limoges platter that had been their aunt's, several small impressionist

she looked into the child's eyes and saw a future there, long and beautiful and bright, a future that would go on after Yona herself had passed from the world, a future still unwritten.

It isn't what characteristics, what traits you've inherited from your parents that make you who you are. It's the choices you make, Henry, that decide what kind of person you become.

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.

When we lavish our money we rob our heir; when we merely save it we rob ourselves.

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.

Once upon a time, there had been gods. Now there were only children going about in their dead parents' undergarments.

Tenemos tantos enemigos. La mayoría de ellos son ineludibles, los heredamos como una obligación, pero los que nos buscamos nosotros mismos son especiales. Deberíamos elegirlos con cuidado.