Quotes About Heritage

We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honor them as though still living

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart." —DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

Grandmother. Agnes had not said anything like "grandmother." The word hadn't even existed until the eighteenth century

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

I'm double bred for death by fire.

They were saddened that [Rawlins] was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.

We come here from Georgia. Our family did. Horse and wagon. I pretty much know that for a fact. I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes.

It was for us and it will be for others

I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the saying goes.

At one time I could have seen myself living there. It was built by my great-grandfather. I've seen photographs of it and it was quite beautiful.

No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.

Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.

You're also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They're an interesting bunch. They're so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed upon them by the wider whiteness. It starts before birth and carries on after you're dead. And what whiteness gives, it can take away.

Because evolution isn't directed. It's not streamlined. We're an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you'll make.

He had his mother's looks, his father's temper, and nobody's brains.

She ponders the transmigrations from southern latitudes. the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?

Language is the only homeland.

In the superficial activity of her life, she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long blanks and darkness of abstraction were Polish.

One may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.

Can England die? And what if England dies?

The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren't rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are

Libraries and museums owe their richest collections to people who cannot bear to think that their names might perish from the memory of the race.

We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.