Quotes About Ancestry

Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort, she'd been astonished by her body's ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.

Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.

I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess.

I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household.

He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens.

On my mom's side I'm Mexican, and my dad is a white dude.

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'

This is everything for me, my only service in life. And let people not know, but my blood will know that he's mine. Only our blood remembers us anyway.

If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

Did the primitive Ancestor have any inkling of voluntary death? Or is that an attainment of the higher civilizations, which offer no other means of escape? Let's

Maybe I am staring into a piece of paper like it is a pond, hoping one day that what looks back is not my own reflection, but my great-grandmother's face. Maybe poetry is the distance between my face and her face. Maybe it's the difference between how the moon looks in the sky and how it contorts when a mayfly travels across the pond.

If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.

Happy the man who, removed from all cares of business, after the manner of his forefathers cultivates with his own team his paternal acres, freed from all thought of usury.

My family background was heavily slanted toward business and seafaring matters.

Since there was no picture of the old country in our house and since I didn't have one etched in my mind, the old country came to mean my grandmother. Whatever it was, she was. Whatever she was, it was.

The old country. That phrase came up now and then. A phrase that seemed to have a lock on it. I knew it meant Armenia, but it made me uneasy. If I asked about the old country, the adults would change the subject. Once my mother said, 'It's an ancient place, it's not really around anymore.' Where had it gone? I asked myself.

Let us all unite, and...declare that we will not leave our own country...this is our...country; ...our forefathers have planted trees in America for us and we intend to stay and eat the fruit.

Genetic evidence, of individuals across the world, alive now, shows that all non-African people are descended from one small group that must have passed through the Arabian peninsula.

La alabanza o la condena, la virtud o la culpa, han de aplicarse a nuestros actos, no a nuestra ascendencia ni a nuestra adscripción a este o aquel grupo.

Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters.

He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable. He had seen that we don't come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another.