Quotes About Heritage

In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world.

All immigrants walk around with a scar left behind by their crossing into a new country, an invisible mark of the exile that became their condition when they were uprooted.

She's as bad as the most racially deprived white person fetishizing Asian culture. Her interest in Dagou, in the Chao family, is entirely due to her sense of deprivation after having been raised as racially Chinese in a well-meaning but white American family. Can't she get over it?

He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds. They would figure that someone might need to know those facts; they themselves might not need to, but their children might, or their grandchildren might.

It wasn't merely damage done by the sun that was causing him to slip suddenly into Greek; it was the Scull dementia, damage from the broken seed. His father, Evanswood Scull, intermittently mad but a brilliant linguist, used to stomp into the nursery, thundering out passages in Latin, Greek, Icelandic, and Old Law French, a language which it was said that he was the only man in America to have a thorough mastery

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

Though a Kickapoo, the man had respect for the old ways. He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds. They would figure that someone might need to know those facts; they themselves might not need to, but their children might, or their grandchildren might.

sepulchers.

was a phrase my mother inherited from her mother. I had heard Grandma Anglund use it for occasions ranging from a scraped knee (mine) to a family burned out of its farm.

Ellos, que no pertenecen ni a mi mundo ni al de los españoles. Ellos, que son la mezcla de todas las sangres--la iberica, la africana, la romana, la goda, la sangre indigena y la sangre del medio oreinte--, ellos que junto con todos los que estan naciendo, son el nuevo recipeinte para que el verdadero pensamiento de Cristo--Quetzalcoatl se instale nuevamente en los corazones y proyecte al mundo su luz, ¡que nunca tengan miedo! ¡que nunca se sientan solos!

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin

This is Indian country, isn't it?" Laura said. "What did we come to their country for, if you don't like them?

Pa promised that when they came to the West, Laura should see a papoose.

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit.

Indian, as in American Indian.

So they went to sea because it was their livelihood, and in all likelihood their fathers' before them;

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

Life is never smooth to the great-granddaughter of tin peddlers who were kicked out of Russia,' said Misty. 'It's no accident that all my family is in one embattled profession or another. We're just waiting for the Cossacks to come back. When the Cossacks come to Connecticut, you'll understand.' Meanwhile, it was hard to feel much gloom at all, although to keep her balance, Misty clung to it wherever she found it.

A member of the Archery Club tries to say that we are all foreigners and we should give the country back to the Native Americans, but she's buried under disagreement.

The Welsh are not like any other people in Britain, and they know how separate they are. They are the Celts, the tough little wine-dark race who were the original possessors of the island, who never mixed with the invaders coming later from the east, but were slowly driven into the western mountains.

history - the lamp which illumines national character...

It's really sad for me that in the United States the Latino community is losing its culture and language, especially among kids born here - a lot of them can't even speak our language.

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.