Quotes About Heritage

Nicholas went to choral evensong on the Sunday, and could have wept. They sang part of a Tallis motet and he thought, If the time comes when nobody can hear this sound anymore, it will be the end.

Together we will ensure that for as long as we are alive to achieve it, the King's School shall send its singing boys to the cathedral as it has done these four hundred years.

they constituted the list of names her mother and

Once, we all lived in the sea," the grandmother had told her. "Its salt runs in our blood; our tears are memories of the ocean.

Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

Religion isn't in your DNA. you don't believe just because your parents believe.

Forgetting the past is forgetting our roots and our basic structure.

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story.

Mans greatest fear is to be forgotten, to leave a legacy is to say 'Don't forget me.'

When aiming for success don't forget who you are and what you came from...

I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, who are you?

A person who does not remember where he came from will never reach his destination.

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

My first advice on how not to grow old would be to choose you ancestors carefully.

Race, let's remember, is a social invention and a cultural identification, not a biological reality.

The past is never truly gone. It lives on in the memories of those who experienced it, in the stories that are told and retold, and in the places where it unfolded. We must honor the past by acknowledging its impact on our present, and by learning from its lessons to shape our future. (p. 21)

The past is never truly gone. It lives on in the memories of those who experienced it, in the stories that are told and retold, and in the places where it unfolded. We must honor the past by acknowledging its impact on our present, and by learning from its lessons to shape our future

A certain emotional frostiness is the heritage of a culture that puts great stock in WASP values: One does not talk about money sex, religion, and above all, one does not expose one's feelings. If a case can be made for the cultural contouring of personality, the Puritan ethic is the culprit in such rubrics as 'Children should be seen and not heard' and 'Never complain, never explain.

In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

So, remember what we learned in the lycée, the words of Phan Boi Chau? 'For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country.

When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one's father was born and where one's father was buried. My father's father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh's birthplace.