Quotes About Heritage

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they're the best songs ever.

Shared history was the coin of the realm.

of all that has been learned is clear and indisputable: all known living organisms are descendants from a single common ancestral form.

The southern leaders perceived the transcontinental as the means of extending their plantation economy westward, replicating the same kind of small-town America characteristic of the antebellum South and, crucially, retaining the slave labor that was integral to their way of life: "The South saw land in a traditional light, as home and heritage, not as a natural resource to benefit capital and state.

I found it a condescending expectation—that my words and mannerisms would meld into the mainstream around me—but it was also a fair question: how do you retain so strongly strands of somewhere or something you have never lived? - Nour Malas

Syria: never the country I called home, but certainly my homeland. - Nour Malas

Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel.

In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn't know until we left how much we took those things for granted.

It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables.

I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must've been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark—"cured," he said, through years of toil—but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway. Mr. Grote doesn't

Well," she says, "I'm a Penobscot Indian on my father's side. When I was young, we lived on a reservation near Old Town." "Ah. Hence the black hair and tribal makeup." Molly is startled. She's never thought to make that connection—is it true?

and the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas,

Riddled his body with bullets"—my da talked like that. Mam was always shushing him, but he waved her off. "It's important they know this," he said. "It's their history! We might be over here now, but by God, our people are over there.

She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you.

In Mr. Reed's classroom there's a photo of Molly Molasses taken near the end of her life. In it she sits ramrod straight, wearing a beaded, peaked headdress and two large silver brooches around her neck. Her face is dark and wrinkled and her expression is fierce. Sitting in the empty classroom after school one day, Molly stares at that face for a long time, looking for answers to questions she doesn't know how to ask.

Tell Papa I'm a communist, but a bad communist. I use a lipstick made by a Russian noble, Prince Matchabelli. (It sounds Italian though.).

Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.

Die Mauern aus Feldsteinen, die Dächer aus gebrannten Ziegeln, von Maurern gemauert, nicht von Architekten entworfen. Sie kannten die Winde – jedes Haus eine Festung gegen die Überfälle des Mistrals –, kannten die barmherzige und die unbarmherzige Sonne, kannten den Regen und kannten jene, für die sie bauten.

Because Y DNA and mtDNA don't get reshuffled with other DNA, they can be used to learn something about an individual in your family tree who lived 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 years ago. That person is still there, in a sense, in you in a completely disproportionate way to the rest of your grandparents.

If the hyperconnectedness of humanity is true, it would mean that everyone alive today—you, your neighbor, Vladimir Putin, and the emperor of Japan—could count the same Egyptian pharaoh, as well as everyone else alive at the time, as a distant grandparent.

Where genealogy was concerned, I met many people who proclaimed their indifference to it, but it was often an extremely vigorous indifference.

As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic's Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.

You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome.