Quotes About Heritage

He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

Orang takkan pernah terlalu sibuk untuk memahami asalnya. --Nenek

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

And under the fanning shade of the mango tree, as hands wove black curls into even rows, I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story Ã¢â'¬Â¦.

Kalau mereka tidak berakar pada tradisi mereka sendiri, mereka tak akan mampu menghargai kebudayaan orang lain.

Finally, I wanted to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life in public service; how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in. A way to explain the different strands of my mixed up heritage and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

He's basically a good man. But he doesn't know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can't know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They've seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like.

Malcolm X avait formulé un jour, le voeu que le sang blanc qui coulait en lui (...) soit expurgé. (...) Mais en ce qui me concernait, je savais que dans mon cheminement vers le respect de moi-même, jamais je ne pourrais réduire mon propre sang blanc au rang de pure abstraction. Car que supprimerais-je en moi par la même occasion, si je devais laisser ma mère et mes grands-parents à la frontière d'un territoire inexploré ?

But she and my grandfather had no firm ideological or partisan leanings to speak of, beyond what they considered to be common sense.

how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in, a way to explain the different strands of my mixed-up heritage, and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.

once you pack in all the Lafrenières, Borés, Macartys, Chauvins, Viellards, Boisclaires, Boisblancs, and Lebedoyere connections, even if they don't have dancing afterward—which they will

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.

After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that [Italian] heritage swamps all competition. It's a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and feeds you so well you really don't want to leave.

According to her, if he hasn't been dead twenty years, he isn't history.

Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.

Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that has scant use for mules.

What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians? I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

In my time I've learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we're born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they've always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women.

was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.