Quotes About Ancestry

He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

The names of families are the front doors of history.

The libraries, which they have inherited from their fathers, are secluded, like dreary sepulchres, from the light of day.

se describen. Al seguir la historia de estas familias

Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebatstien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present...

The former slaves preferred to focus on feeling the power of God's loves, in the tradition of the invisible institution of their parents and grandparents.

At sound and scent of the approaching huddle of sheep, Treve leaped to his feet; queer ancestral instincts tugging at the back of his alert young brain. In all his eight months of life he had never seen nor smelt a sheep. But his Scottish ancestors, for a hundred generations, had earned their right to live by tending such creatures as these which came trooping past the shack. Something far stronger than himself urged the put to action.

To a dog, all men are gods. That does not mean they are his won particular gods or that he has any interest in most of them. But they are of the race which he and his ancestors have served and guarded and worshipped since the days when the new earth was covered with vapor and he Neanderthal man tamed the first wolf-cub.

It's a very powerful neurosis—to not know where one came from and not love what one was. The family tree is what one was. It's important to recognize it head-on and love it.

You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.

but the image of a "fatal" disappearance of the "vanishing American" allows Indian ancestry - as opposed to African American "blood" - to function as nostalgia and pride rather than shame. Somehow, by claiming the Indians as ancestors, whites can legitimate as lawful inheritance the taking of their land.

the reason he had known about Islam long before he studied the religion at Dartmouth. He was one-quarter Muslim by birth. Noor had

My grandmother was in line to be shot into a pit. She said, 'What happens if I step out of line?' He said, 'I don't have the heart to shoot you but somebody will,' and she stepped out of line. For that, I am here and my children are here. So step out of line, ladies, step out of line.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feat -and the pale palms of her hands- to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, "The more blackness a woman has the more beautiful she is.

Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee." (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)

Were they really Aboriginal? Did they really belong to Warren Finch's ancestral country? Anthropologists, lawyers and other experts, like archeologists, sociologists and historians, were called to examine the genealogies of these people. And emergency legislation was bulldozed through parliament in the dead of night which claimed that Warren Finch was the blood relative of every Australian, which gave power to the government to decide where he was to be buried.

Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?

I'm half Jewish half WASP.