Quotes About Heritage

He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

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

In America you could lose everything except the memory of your original name.

A generation has more in common, after all, than a nation, than a profession.

father nodded. "Well, getting to know each other means getting to know everything. Family structure, how one was raised—those are important factors.

When he'd started out, he'd been vaguely competent, but now political aspirations had set in. Apparently, his wife was the second cousin to King Arthur's maid or something. She felt entitled to a higher station in life.

When, soon, they join in their happy wedding-bonds— and wedded let them be—in pacts of peace at last, never command the Latins, here on native soil, to exchange their age-old name, to become Trojans, called the kin of Teucer, alter their language, change their style of dress. Let Latium endure.

Here have lived for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths have left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing have left this. -Viginia Woolf

the whole of life, its masters, its adventurers, then appeared in long ranks of magnificent human beings behind me; and I was the inheritor; I, the continuer; I, the person miraculously appointed to carry it on.

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

Gold runs in our blood.

women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers – a woman's always proud of her father.

And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other.

But, if we now turn to human society, what chaos and confusion meet the eye! No Club has any such jurisdiction upon the breed of man. The Heralds College is the nearest approach we have to the Spaniel Club. It at least makes some attempt to preserve the purity of the human family. But when we ask what constitutes noble birth—should our eyes be light or dark, our ears curled or straight, are topknots fatal, our judges merely refer us to our coats of arms.

Are you sure you don't have a crazy hairy grandmother in your family?

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.

The Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader's strength. I have a certain personal interest in the question, for if my fathers had not been good readers, I would hardly be here today, speaking of these matters in this tongue.

I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil.

Consider me, Descended also From the Mystery.

I never felt so lonesome Since I was born black.

People are absolutely haunted by [history]. You can see it at the swap meets.

Religion doesn't play any part in my life in terms of how I live my life. But I don't think I've ever gone through a day in my life without hearing someone say the word 'Jew' or saying it myself.