Quotes About Ancestors

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

On both sides of my family, my grandparents grew up in total poverty and came to California during the Great Depression. The only way they were able to work their way out of that was by joining the military, which is how they both went on to be able to go to college.

Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.

Never forget, Alexandros, that this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn't. If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.

When Brian Eno approached the father of Anthea Norman-Taylor for permission to marry her, he was told, "What you have to ask yourself is, 'Would I wish this woman to be the grandmother of my grandchildren?

As biologist Frans de Waal points out, "We would not be here today had our ancestors been socially aloof." We have survived by caring and cooperating.

There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, "Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.

The dolphins' evolutionary path is itself a preposterous feat: their predecessors were land mammals that resembled small, hooved wolves.

Many people nowadays have surnames that reveal their ancestors' fairy origins. Otherlander and Fairchild are two.

People think that great grandparents do not matter to kids. But they matter to me. They are my history. The more I know about them, the further my roots can stretch

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

I am out listening for the words, for the breath of my ancestors

the two evolutionary lines, ours and the Neanderthals', both developed such large brains, and perhaps other characteristics in common, because we exchanged genes.

Poverty is the curse of ancient but numerous lineages.

He wanted her. He wanted her completely. But his family was waiting for him at supper, and his ancestors were staring down at him from their portrait frames, and *she* - the woman in question - was watching him with a wariness that broke his heart.

My ancestors were fighters, something I have inherited.

I've always been proud that I come from people who were activists, who have this indomitable spirit. I am proud to have inherited the spirit of resistance and revolution.

Por entonces nadie podia imaginar que aquel encuentro fortuito seria el inicio de una historia que habria de trascender generaciones y geografias.

For all I had heard about ancestors, I had no wish to be one. The idea of having children so they could have children so they could have children frightened me. It seemed so pointless, like that blissful measure of time in Heaven that so comforted the devout: 'If a bird transferred every grain of sand on every beach, grain by grain, and dropped them in the ocean, that is the beginning of eternity.

Toprak ebedi bir güç mmembas?yd?, çünkü o gerçek Anam?zd?, bizi besler ve ayr?ca ba?r?nda atalar?m?z? saklard?. Tabiatta dönü?üm onda gerçekle?irdi.

You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.

Behind me there were ghosts of people like a trailing fog as far as I could see -- grandfathers of grandfathers and grandmothers of grandmothers without number.

My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.

We of the Twentieth Century have abandoned the practice of holding something in reserve when we love our children, assuming – as our ancestors would never have dared to do – that they will reach adulthood as a matter of course.