Quotes About Heritage

Jossi had been slow in agreeing with Ben Yehuda and the others. Hebrew had to be revived. If the desire for national identity was great enough a dead language could be brought back. But Sarah was set in her ways. Yiddish was what she spoke and what her mother had spoken. She had no intention of becoming a scholar so late in life.

For you see, in Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over.

Karen se hundió en un pesar todavía más profundo que antes. El espíritu intrépido que la había mantenido en pie desapareció. Sintió que la maldición de haber nacido judía la había conducido a la locura de abandonar Dinamarca.

If you're Irish enough, you can go an entire lifetime filled with conversations that never took place, like those

My crime is being Indian. What's yours?

Oh, Ruth. I wish we had our own words to describe ourselves, to connect us." Ruth stood up and opened the broiler. "I don't need another label," she sighed. "I just am what I am. I call myself Ruth. My mother is Ruth Anne; my grandmother was Anne. That's who I am. That's where I come from." I shrugged. "I don't want another label either. I just wish we had words so pretty we'd go out of our way to say them out loud.

a whisperer of Yiddish—the lingua franca spoken by Jewish immigrants when they didn't want their American children to understand what they were saying

With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song...

Gideon isn't for sale mister. Ah, yes. Like the Louisana Purchase, or Manhattan. I see. Should I have come with a purse full of beads and a wagon of diseased blankets? ... Can't you smell the history in the air? No doubt their grandfathers rushed across these prairies in their wagons, knocking down the natives, smashing in their brains in their zeal to stake for their claim. That pioneer spirit. My, what a land! I have learned so much from you

My family traditions are alcoholism and dysfunction," Jennifer said. "Oh, and anything you can make from government cheese.

I've never understood this obsession with where we are from that we Americans seem to have. We are from here, are we not? Sometimes I find this clannishness, these ties to old homelands, ancient traditions, and familial bloodlines, to be nothing more than fear—the same fear that keeps us praying to an absent God.

Lilian Jackson Braun

New Historical

Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

He's familiar, but he's not the same. He's an American whose family came from Haiti. My aunt, my sister, myself, we are Haitians who now live in America. He has never felt the ground shake beneath his feet. He doesn't understand that it can happen again.

Bostonians will tell you that Mattapan is that kind of neighborhood. Rough. Poor. Filled with hardworking souls, of course, and a rich cultural heritage thanks to having the country's largest Haitian population outside of Florida. But also a hotbed of gang activity

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

I can't imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

I think forgiveness plays a very important part in Western society and it comes from the Judeo Christian heritage.

I was never accepted into certain parts of New England society because my grandfather was an Irish barkeep.

Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.

Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.