Quotes About Ancestry

'Cullum' is Scottish, but I'm nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry.

American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.

We all have to consciously make efforts to identify our roots and nurture them.

When I tell people I'm an Italian Jew, they're very amused by it. But obviously by blood I'm Jewish, because my mother is.

Incarnación Felipe de la Cruz y Monte Piedras

El mexicano no quiere ser ni indio, ni español. Tampoco quiere descender de ellos. Los niega. Y no se afirma en tanto que mestizo, sino como abstracción: es un hombre. Se vuelve hijo de la nada. Él empieza en sí mismo.

La historia de México es la del hombre que busca su filiación, su origen.

Within me burns a flame which has been passed from generations uncounted and its heat is a constant irritation to my spirit to become better than I am, and I will.

So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.

I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were."-

Knowing that she doesn't love me hurts so much that I'd rather think she was taken against her will, which in turn makes me think of how I want to kill those bastards. Our ancestors used to torture criminals before they executed them—it's in times like these that one truly understands the importance of tradition.

I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton

Here is the meaning of life: ...to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off. (Anton)

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

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.

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledger book? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

Out of their anterior lives they had arrived at the same understanding as their fathers before them. That movement itself is a form of property.

Di tutto ciò che è uscito dalle sordide gole degli anziani, dai vecchi libri ammuffiti, non ho salvato una parola. Ho sognato che camminavo con mio nonno sulla riva di un lago scuro e i discorsi del vecchio erano pieni di incertezza. Ho visto come tutto ciò che è finto si stacca dai morti.

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.

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

You and I are cobbled out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. We could have a carbon cell in one of our elbows that was once part of a trilobite's tail. Or a cell from Atilla the Hun's moustache in our eye. Or an ancient lotus petal in our tonsils.

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