Quotes About Ancestry

You live in the past,' Kate said. 'You live in your grandfather's time.' But she was wrong. The past was not something we could live in, because it had nothing to do with life. It was something we lugged about, as heavy as a sack of rotting apples.

Wild things are made from human histories.

We are walking archives of ancestral wisdom.

Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect.

I had no children and shall have none. There are moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity.

We all came from our mothers' bellies. We all have hope in our veins. We don't want history to forget us, but the dead look after the afterwards.

An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair.

Sir Henry fixed him with a keen eye. 'Odd name, Tom Skatt - eh?' 'Thats right' 'You don't think we could be related?' Tom looked up at his great-great-great-uncle and smiled. 'I don't think so' 'No,' grinned Sir Henry "no, of course not

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the 'gorilla theory of human ancestry.' All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding the fossil ancestors of man was recognized, distinctly stated that none of the known anthropoid apes, much less any of the known monkeys, should be considered in any way as ancestral to the human stock.

One of my illustrious predecessors.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.

His family, it seemed evident, had enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations. It had happened so far back in the past that the whites had been able to forget it, and even among the blacks it was only a dim memory—so dim that it had only the frail substance of a phantom, a voice that whispered only faintly in the roll of begats carried in the memories of the elders.

I united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family-- the monkey.

Oblonsy was fond of a pleasant joke, and sometimes liked to perplex a simple-minded man by observing that if you're going to be proud of your ancestry, why stop short at Prince Rurik and repudiate your oldest ancestor - the ape?

Besides, Oblonsky was fond of a pleasant joke, and sometimes liked to perplex a simple-minded man by observing that if you're going to be proud of your ancestry, why stop short at prince Rurik and repudiate your oldest ancestor-- the ape?