Quotes About Heritage

You are still called by your slave-masters' names. By rights, by international rights, you belong to the white man of America. He knows that. You have never gotten out of the shackles of slavery. You are still in them.

Another common way to define blues is as a tradition that employs a range of tonal and rhythmic practices originating in West Africa.

oohing and aahing over the Old Whaling Church and

the way Adrienne's mother had taught her eighty-two years earlier.

Italy/Is one thing, England one.

The greenhouse—distant cousin, Ida, reportedly something of a botanist. The bed where we conceived Lily: Great-great-great-great-Aunt Minerva. Aunt Augustine's dish set isn't just an heirloom—it really is Aunt Augustine.

I can all but hear my Haudenoseunee grandfather's wry comments as he stopped to pick up litter on the roadside.

Keith topped six feet, broad chest and thick limbs showing the heritage of the same Norse raiders who had left Scotland his burnished red hair and the feral gleam in his eyes. Those eyes were level with Fyodor's chin, when Fyodor straightened to his full height.

His life is England's, now.

Whatever this child had from Strifbjorn…he was smarter than Strifbjorn had ever shown himself.

It was a relief to speak his native tongue, familiar words and known patterns that had settled into his bones with father's milk and rooted deep.

Are you really an orphan? Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you? No, not at present, but I suppose it's a thing one is bound to be.

She had Scottish blood in her and was of a saving turn of mind.

But mostly I'm just respectful of old ways. I believe things for a reason, and in the old days they did things for a reason. And if you don't understand why—well, you might end up opening a few doors better left closed. That's all.

The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.

Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?

all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.)

Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

Here's how Granny looks,' Melissy said, sucking in her lips to look toothless. 'Here's Granny.' 'Shame to you,' Ellen said. 'I'll whip you and whip hard if I hear you make fun of your granny. Don't let me hear e'er one of you make fun of your granny or your grandpap either. Granny, she's old. It's a shame to make fun of old folks. You'll be old yourself some day.

Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.

There are too many people in the world as it is, but the supply of ancient manuscripts is severely limited.

He built public buildings in all places and without number, but he inscribed his own name on none of them except the temple of his father Trajan. At Rome he restored the Pantheon, the voting enclosure, the Basilica of Neptune, very many Temples, the forum of Augustus, the baths of Agrippa . . . Also he constructed the bridge named after himself, a tomb on the bank of the Tiber and the temple of the Bona Dea.

The particular human chain we're part of is central to our individual identity. Even if we loathe our families, in order to know ourselves, we seem to need to know about them, just as prologue. Not to know is to live with some of the disorientation and anxiety of the amnesiac.