Quotes About Inheritance

It is often hazardous to marry an heiress, as she is not unfrequently the last of a diseased family.

Momo: [reading Ibrahim's will] This is my will and testament. I, Ibrahim Demirdji, hereby leave all my goods to Moses Schmitt, my son Momo because he chose me as his father and because I've given him everything I've learned in this life. Now you too will know what's in my Koran, Momo. It's all there is to know.

There was no magical key, no way to run or hide from my legacy. This was the life that had been given to me. What I made of it was up to me.

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

And thou shalt in thy daughter see, This picture, once, resembled thee.

One of my favorite phobias is that girls, especially those whose tastes aren't routine, often don't get a fair break... It has come down through the generations, an inheritance of age-old customs which produced the corollary that women are bred to timidity.

Our ancestors are our children; we peer through a hole in the wall and watch them play in their rooms, and they can't see us.

We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.

Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.

Do any wedding rings have happy stories?" Felix asked, sounding exasperated. "Well, yes. But those are the rings that usually end up on the fingers of happy corpses or being willed to happy people who wear them to their own weddings.

Strange things our parents give us that we cannot give away or put on a shelf.

Doesn't living in a domestic partnership with me reduce the number of cows your father can get for you in marriage?

Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh. -An-mei

Do you come from old money, new money, or no money?

To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.

In 1920, shortly before he died, he was quoted in the New York Times saying, "My life was never destined to be quite happy. . . . Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.

Soraya-joon, I have done all that I could. Do not be sorry for us. Your mother and I await you upon your return. We love you more than we have loved life. After your dear brother name your first son. Live here if you like, but if you sell it take no less than one hundred thousand dollars. ~Bawbaw

Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories — "The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare's Memory" — a blessing is always a mixed blessing. As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades. (pg 303, "What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges")

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder.

I have skinny genes. My mother weighs 90 pounds.

If you play a part that's been done before, on stage for instance, you feel like you're carrying a torch and staggering under the weight of it for a bit and then passing it on to somebody else.

When I was growing up, my dad didn't have weights, so he made himself a weight bench. Instead of a hand-me-down jacket, it was a hand-me-down weight bench.

When my father died, the money he left us would have dried up within a year were it not for my mother... We might very well have ended up on welfare.