Quotes About Heritage

Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.

Toda a gente é influenciada por coisas que precedem a educação formal, que saem do nada e da vida do dia a dia. A essas influências excluídas chamo avós.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.

I always knew that my middle name was an anglicized version of a great-grandmother's name, but I dropped it in my teens, not liking its sound and feeling that a middle name was unnecessary, given how few people have my last name. Only now have I realized which great-grandmother that name belonged to, only writing this story do I know the name of that unknown woman and that it is also mine, or is now the blank space between my names.

I could tell that he had heard about me and that I would soon be a figure in the stories he would tell his grandchildren. A strange figure: The man who kept asking everyone about the yeti, and who himself looked like one. I did not want to know that tale, but I knew that it meant that the tale of the yeti - in some form - would exist forever. Storytellers die; their stories live on.

manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned

Sie wissen, dass sich dort draußen kein Mensch für Literatur interessiert und sie die letzten Hüter einer glorreichen, in die Krise geratenen Tradition sind.

Así somos él y yo, tal vez le sirva, le digo a Renzi, tipos sin arraigo, gente anacrónica, los últimos sobrevivientes de una estirpe en disolución.

Our names were made for us in another century.

Isn't it remarkable that almost every child follows the same religion as their parents, and it always just happens to be the right religion!

senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.

Just by chance, you could happen to give all your mother's versions to your child, and none of your father's. In this case, your father would have given no DNA to his grandchild. Of course such a scenario is highly unlikely, but as we go down to more distant descendants, total non-contribution of DNA becomes more possible.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.

We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips

First cousins, for instance, have two common ancestors, and the generation distance via each one is 4. Therefore their relatedness is

Well, my family has been Catholic for generations, so doesn't that make me Catholic?' 'That's lazy, sloppy abuse of language. My family has been farming for generations but that doesn't define me as a farmer.

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.

And, for speakers of Arabic and Indian languages, knowledge of the Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita is presumably just as essential for full appreciation of their literary heritage.

Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing

White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome," he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.

Over the course of a few generations, the average intelligence in an aristocratic family fell toward the population average, hastened by marriages that matched bride and groom by lineage, not ability.

They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.

Tell me, do you get the ape in you from your mother's or your father's side of the family? - Cat