Quotes About Heritage

Reynolds Lucius Wadsworth III was Waddy's real name, the result of a three-generation tradition of unparalleled cruelty in the naming of first-born boys.

all that could be hoped for was for each generation to be raised to be sensible enough to learn from the past, not to lose sight of the things that mattered, and to understand why they mattered.

The Crusaders had not only taken into themselves the notion that they would become better people through violence; they also projected onto the victims of their violence their own inner demons. This is probably the most obvious and long-lasting heritage of the crusade. We still do it.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

They can tak' oour lives but they canna tak' oour troousers!

They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.

Death was hereditary. You got it from your ancestors.

He quite liked the English. They tended to say sorry a lot, which was quite understandable given their heritage and the crimes of their ancestors.

The past needs to be remembered. If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going.

This is Masher,' said Feeney. 'His father was a wild boar, his mother was surprised.

Some people say you achieve immortality through your children, said the minstrel. Yeah? said Cohen. Name one of your great-granddads, then.

You're saying,' he said, weighing each word, 'that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle.

Royalty pollutes people's minds, boy. honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone's granddad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was.

The way I see it, my ancestors put a lot of effort into getting out of the goddamn ocean and I don't think I should throw all of that hard work back in their faces.

If you left off traditions because you didn't know why they started you'd be no better than a foreigner.

But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history. But

it wasn't the wearing of the hat that counted so much as having one to wear. Every trade, every craft had its hat.

They were probably descended from people who learned that if you look too hard at anyone on horseback you receive a sharp stinging sensation such as might be obtained by a stick around the ear. Not looking up at people on horseback had become hereditary. People who stared at people on horseback in what was considered to be a funny way never survived long enough to breed.

Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside.

Our national parks hold our stories in inexplicable ways. Acadia National Park may be small in size but the vista it offers across the Atlantic is a passionate genealogy of all that is infinite and alive above and below the surface.

We form the future by being caretakers of our past.

Our National Parks] are more than scenery, they are portals and thresholds of wonder, an open door that swings back and forth from our past to our future.

Where do I belong? You can't belong everywhere. Or perhaps we can if we pay attention to the paths of our ancestors. Perhaps this is what it means to be American. Bloodlines originate in storylines. Some people stay in place, others move on. But if we look back far enough, we are all interconnected, interrelated, through place and race and time. *