Quotes About Heritage

But God was never about power over us. It was about the power we possessed to either be good in His graces, or be selfish and wretched in His shadow. So to speak. Hell is being in that shadow. It's not in the next world, but this one, right now, anytime you choose not to do the right thing. As long as we're still here, not merely surviving but trying to do right by one another, then I believe that the heritage of God's light is still in us.

That flag's not just the emblem of being a racist asshole, a club to which your daddy probably belongs happily. But it's also the Confederate flag. The one carried by Southerners to say to the Yankees—that's your daddy, a Yankee—'Don't tread on me or I'll pop a musket ball up your ass.' Northerners driving around with the Dixie flag is like a Jew wearing a 'Go Hitler!' baseball cap." Jonesy's

No, no, I know, it's just—you know, I thought . . ." "Because I have Syrian heritage I hate the Jews?" "When you put it like that, I'm pretty sure I'm a dumb-ass.

brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton

They took our land, then they took our water. But Hawaiians lost more then that. The haole took away our pride. They called us 'natives'. They told us our language was no good, that our gods were evil.

Was that what made him a European? To want to have his story told once more, passed down the line to another eager listener who would, in his time, disregard its lesson and repeat his own suffering? Ah, how he loved tradition.

Yes, Istanbul does live up to its nickname as the 'Queen of Cities.' Born to the Greeks, raised by the Romans, and matured under the Ottomans.

In the biracial world constructed in nineteenth-century North America, people had to choose sides; more often the choice was made for them.

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

The Borderlander's combative culture has provided a large proportion of the nation's military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and Douglas MacArthur to the enlisted men fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. They also gave the continent bluegrass and country music, stock car racing, and Evangelical fundamentalism.

From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage.

Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

Sometimes the fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there. Cora did not pray.

Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?

Wainwright was pale-skinned, but all the black boys knew from his hair and nose that he had some Negro blood. He beat the black boys for knowing what he pretended not to know about himself.

She took her hatchet. She took flint and tinder. And like her mother she dug up her yams.

The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.

You're supposed to pass on something useful to your children.

Black hands built the White House

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.

She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past.

He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father?