Quotes About Heritage

But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.

People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market.

Achoo, Jose, Yako, Anian, Elayan, Kuttan, Vijayan, Vawa, Joy, Sumathi, Ammal, Annamma, Kanakamma, Latha, Sushila, Vi-jayamma, Jollykutty, Mollykutty, Lucykutty, Beena Mol (girls with bus names).

History's fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.

Self-preservation starts very early in West Indian families.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

They convinced me meaning they had dragged her 4'10 Black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.

As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought, 'No wonder Mr. Bubble always gave me a urinary tract infection and hives.' Mr Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings. It was in my Vanderbilt genes.

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you? He answered, Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.

A surprising percentage of your own society, with all your heritage of murder, would like to believe that Life survives by going to the supermarket. So the ideal would be to train cattle to make butcher knives and take turns cutting each other up at a convenient location.

Es cierto que la Internacional clama que «Hagamos tabla rasa del pasado» y que Mao se comparaba a un poeta genial que caligrafiaba sobre la famosa página en blanco. ¡Como si a una civilización de una antigüedad de varios milenios se la pudiera considerar una página en blanco!

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.

For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan;

You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there's no way to tell if that grandmother's Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus.

Everybody who is anybody in the Philippines today, except for a few Spanish mestizos, has Chinese ancestors.

Who we are takes generations to create and doesn't end with death.

Times may change; Cynsters never do

There were no more nations, but there were neighbourhoods, regions, zones, and a hierarchy of councils, parliaments and congresses: talking shops, all the way up to some kind of world-government council. This system was what they called the Common Heritage. He wondered vaguely if this had evolved from a form of emergency organisation in the refugee days – the 'Chaos' – maybe built on some elements of the old UN.

The Roosevelts, Bayards, Van Cortlandts, and Rhinelanders were in the sugar-refining business.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Indian maiden, of course.