Quotes About Ancestry

Passed down from generation to generation, storytelling was an art in my family.

When we first draw breath outside the womb, we inhale tiny particles of all that came before, both literally and figuratively. We are never merely individuals; we are never alone; we are always in the company of others, of the past, of history.

grandfathers"—the tribe

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

There might be the odd person in my family who was an artist down the line, but no one in my immediate family is an actor of any kind.

Oddly enough, my grandfather probably had more of an influence on me than my father.

Oh, how hard it must be to die anywhere but in one's birthplace.

Oh, it is a boon to have a lineage like mine. Of course there's additional responsibility, and I have to live up to expectations all the time, but that's fine with me.

We hear stories from our parents and our grandparents about what life was like in the old country or wherever they came from. They are biblical. They are truth. There could be no alternate history.

My grandparents from the old country, Latvia, were all musical on my father's side.

The only way I'm interested in having a baby is the old-fashioned way.

I think that at heart I am an old-fashioned Chinese, really I am.

I have an older brother who's an actor and a grandfather who was an actor.

My father is the oldest of seven boys.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

Not many people know this but we come from a long line of chicken, pineapple and onion farmers at Ingham in Queensland.

I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.

Thence are we a hardy generation, and able to endure fatigue, and we give proofs from what original we are sprung.

Neither birth nor sacraments nor study nor ancestry can decide whether a person is twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin)," the Mahabharata declares, "character and conduct only can decide.

Our inference systems may be there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent in normal human environments for hundred of thousands of years.

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, "He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.

Our grandfather, in dreamless sleep beneath us, spoke to us from the singing hive of memory.