Quotes About Heritage

If you don't know where your're going, you should know where you came from.

Where do you come from?...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.

There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, "Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you came from.

Handful was my basket name.

The shape she loved was a triangle. Always black. Mauma put black triangles on about every quilt she sewed.

That was the thing mauma and I loved, our time with the quilts.

Jonkonnu if you want to. That was a custom that got started

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

If you don't know where you're going you should know where you come from

The railway terminus and university and court buildings of the Fort area are either lovable or Gothic follies, depending on your taste, but you can look at them and feel something. There are no modern buildings in Bombay that make you feel anything.

tradition is not well suited for globalization.

When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.

No, he didn't win," Great-Uncle Merry said, and even in the clear afternoon sunshine he seemed with every word to become more remote, as ancient as the rock behind him and the old world of which he spoke.

In America . . . the sense of man/s relationship with the land can be found only in the Southwest.

No child is wholly wrapped in the present who has grown up seeing a Norman castle from his or her bedroom window.

She didn't know the going price of cattle on the hoof, or the per acre value of land in this part of the country, but from what she could tell, no Nicholson was ever going to die poor.

She picked at the place mat in front of her. "They were all in law enforcement. It was some kind of sheriff's convention. Your biological father—Earl Haynes—was a sheriff.

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

There, a simple headstone marked the grave of Eva Saloman Johansen, beloved wife and grandmother. Tess was intrigued to see a phrase in Hebrew characters. Her paternal grandmother had apparently been Jewish. Beside that was a marker for Erik Karl Johansen, inscribed, 'Measure his life not by its length but by the depths of joy he brought us. He jumped into life and never touched bottom. We will never laugh the same again.

The Sunrose Building is part of my blood and bone. It is a repository of treasures seen and unseen. I need to stay in order to keep my mind from wandering away. It is the only way to keep the world intact.