Quotes About Heritage

The childhood foods that we ache for are very specific to the place and the time where we grew up.

One of the functions of traditional cuisines is to reinforce these shared childhood food memories.

To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked with them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don't want pasta 'just like Mama used to make'; you actually want Mama herself.

Unlike traditional food, which is remembered jointly within families or communities, mass-produced food and drink is remembered across continents.

We are all descended from survivors, and survivors were the chubby ones.

There are signs that the Japanese themselves consider their excellent cuisine as an essential part of what it means to be Japanese.

Righteousness is as hereditary as vice, and godly men transmit moral qualities to their children, and to their children's children.

Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he'd "have to speak in a forgotten language." He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it's easy to lose ancient languages we've long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?

We affect the future of those who come after us almost as much as we affect our own.

we might have been Welsh, in my dad's eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

His mum was Filipino

If you're afraid they might discover your redneck past, there are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past.

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

But we were also Jewish, one of two Jewish families in our neighborhood, our complex, our compound, and the ovens had been active only fifteen years before.

Strange things are happening to us.''To our children.''They say he is looking for the spirit of Independence.''They say he is looking for himself.''For his own spirit.''Which he lost when the white man came.

The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.

Like most Southerners, I visit battlefields. Southerners will visit almost any battlefield anywhere, but we are especially fond of the Civil War scenes because we know who fought where and how they did their fighting.

it can be too easy to forget where you came from.

Properly cared for, a Savile Row suit can be handed down the generations—like gout.

the enduring human need to be remembered.

What is meant by the deposit? That which is committed to you, not that which is invented by you; that which you have received, not that which you have devised; a thing not of wit but of learning; not of private assumption but of public tradition; a thing brought to you, not brought forth from you; thus you must not be an author, but an authorized keeper; not a leader but a follower. Keep the deposit."509

A nation of spaghetti eaters cannot restore Roman civilization!

Subsistirán las corridas de toros mientras exista en el alma española propensión a la alegría. El día que no haya toros los españoles tendrán que inventarlos