Quotes About Heritage

No one here has to know who I really am. Ever. They can never know. We disappeared with my father, our historic bloodline ended forever.

I knew, as every peasant does, that land can never be truly owned. We are the keepers of the soil, the curators of trees.

We die once when the last breath leaves our bodies. We die a second time when the last person speaks our name.' The first death is beyond our control, but the second one we can strive to prevent.

We die once when the last breath leaves our bodies. We die a second time when the last person speaks our name.

It's strange how you can feel guilty for a family history you didn't have anything to do with, isn't it?

his name possibly handed down through generations like an heirloom—a coin or a favorite piece of jewelry—from long-dead ancestors who possessed no tokens to pass along, save for their names and their stories.

To my grandmothers, for tilling the soil in which we grew and for watering our roots with stories of all the old things

There remained no place in Charleston for a girl of mixed blood like Sarra, nor would such a place exist within his lifetime. Never would tolerance of her be had in polite society. Not abovestairs, and even the women in his mother's kitchen would not permit her company. Some wealthy man would undoubtedly soon take her to mistress, lured by her exotic beauty, yet ashamed of what she was.

Maybe these are woodpile relatives? People my grandmother doesn't want to acknowledge as part of the family tree? Every clan must have a few of those.

Less than ten thousand Choctaw people actually made it here on the Trail of Tears, and they all married each other way back when, so there you go. We're all family somehow or other.

I tried to make sense of what she'd said. "A Sears house. . . . You know, I think this was a Sears Catalog house. I'd forgotten all about that, but I recall Aunt Ruth talking about Poppy ordering the house, and a railcar delivering it in pieces." "Yes!" Hanna Beth smiled. "I remem

When we lose our stories, we lose ourselves.

was their job to always hold tight to the past, to tell it to the young'uns.

The glory is forever. Those were Aginisi's last words to her in Cherokee. Her death words. It was a done thing now.

A Melungeon. She ain't white, she ain't colored, she ain't Injun. Ain't any one a them three kinds would claim her. Ain't just any fool'd take a chance on her, neither. Them Melungeons been hidin' up in these mountains long's anyone can remember. Got a certain look to 'em, like her—dark skin, but not red like a Injun. Black hair, and them cold blue eyes.

You know there is an old proverb that says, 'We die once when the last breath leaves our bodies. We die a second time when the last person speaks our name.' The first death is beyond our control, but the second one we can strive to prevent.

I was raised that way too.

May your names never go unspoken and your stories forever be told.

No one could say the stories were useless for as the tongue clacked five or forty fingers stitched corn was grated from the husk pathwork was pieced or the darning was done... (from 'The Storyteller Poems')

These secrets came down my own ornately curved and twisting family line. For family stories are never as direct as history books, and therefore they are more true.

Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole's Aunt Patti was the last woman standing.

family stories are never as direct as history books, and therefore they are more true.

We're not from the same Britain," Geoffrey said. "I don't come from your grandfather's Great Britain. I come from a rat-infested, coal-filled hole in England called Newcastle. My people were all miners, domestics, and dung shovelers.

The days of recording family births, deaths and marriages in the family Bible were far distant.