Quotes About Ancestry

Unless we can trace our lineage to the original humans and find that we live where they lived, we are all international migrants. Furthermore we are all wanderers. We symbolically carry our homes on our backs, like turtles, snails, and crustaceans -- for the meaning and associations of home are always with us and affect our orientation in space and time, and how we negotiate our way through the world.

repatriation should "start in the minds and hearts of our people; in our words, actions and deeds we must go back to Africa. We may never set foot on the continent in our time, but we can live and represent our heritage each day we live in the world

The Swedish royal family's legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke.

screenings of the documentary about the Juderia made by Rebecca Samonà, the granddaughter of Victoria Sidis Licitri and Ernesto Licitri, who had turned to Stella for help understanding her family's unexplored past. On other evenings there were conversations, between Stella and her cousin Isabelle Levy; between Stella and her former neighbor,

22Fidalgo derives from filho d'algo—literally, the "son of somebody"—though it later became a generic term for nobility.

that Isis and Osiris are not their parents

The tale of someone's life begins before they are born.

Nous voulons retourner dans l'ancienne demeure Où nos pères ont vécu sous l'aile d'un archange, Nous voulons retrouver cette morale étrange Qui sanctifiait la vie jusqu'à la dernière heure.

Queremos regresar a la antigua morada donde el ala de un ángel cubría a nuestros padres, queremos recobrar esa moral  que hasta el postrer instante santifica la vida

Queremos regresar a la antigua morada donde el ala de un ángel cubría a nuestros padres, queremos recobrar esa moral que hasta el postrer instante santifica la vida

To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again- Egyptian Proverb

Det var en uppväxt av brist. Inte en materiell sådan, där hade vi så vi klarade oss, utan en identitetsmässig. Vi var inga. Våra föräldrar var inga. Våra förfäder hade betytt noll och intet för den svenska historien. [...] Vi bröt på finska utan att vara finnar, vi bröt på svenska utan att vara svenskar. Vi var ingenting.

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

There was more to being something than just blood.

And Mozasu? He is Baek Isak's son? He doesn't look like me." Sunja

There's nothing fucking worse than knowing that you're just like everybody else. What a messed-up, lousy existence. And in this great country of Japan—the birthplace of all my fancy ancestors—everyone, everyone wants to be like everyone else. That's why it is such a safe place to live, but it's also a dinosaur village. It's extinct, pal. Carve up your piece and invest your spoils elsewhere.

We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.

My heart is still Bengali. Isn't Didu's?

My dad had been born in Mexico and his family had to leave during the Mexican revolution.

WITH THIS BOOK I respectfully invoke the heroic, aggrieved souls wandering in the boundless bright-red sorghum fields of my hometown. As your unfilial son, I am prepared to carve out my heart, marinate it in soy sauce, have it minced and placed in three bowls, and lay it out as an offering in a field of sorghum. Partake of it in good health!

WE all need a story of where we came from and how we got here.

in general, class distinction was presumed to be dictated by Providence and fixed to eternity. The fifteenth-century Lady Juliana Berners, author of a treatise on hunting, records the common conviction that Seth and Abel, sons of Adam and Eve, were gentlemen, but Cain a churl and ancestor of the churls of the world. Christ, she says, was a gentleman on his mother's side.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

Religion and culture are like a totem pole extending far underground, under the layers of the earth, of different eras of cultures and times, going far into the core of philosophy.