Quotes About Ancestry

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

Growing up, there had always been candles burning, not for the light they gave, but for remembrance. Her grandmother used to say the flame honored a person's spirit, reminded the living that the dead were never really gone.

Once upon a time-which, when you come to think of it, is the only proper way to begin a story-the only way that really smacks of romance and fairyland-all the Harmony members of the Lesley clan assembled at Cloud of Spruce to celebrate Old Grandmother's birthday as usual. Also to name Lorraine's baby.

cupboard. The strange little key, which had been his great-grandmother's

I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

The culture of honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.

This person will have been born in a

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from —

My great-great-great-grandmother

we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

If there ever comes a time that you forget where you came from, you've gone too far.

This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

She didn't even pause to think. She simply said in a way that made it clear there was no more to the story: Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.

The very composition of your blood, your inheritance, has without your knowing it perhaps saved you from problems and pains which most writers are obliged to suffer.

Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.

Est un être humain tout être né de deux êtres humains

There's no better cure for the fear of taking after one's father, than not to know who he is.

Il catafero di Japichinu sarebbe andato a finire nello sbalanco di qualche chiarchiàro... No, il nonno sapeva quanto fosse religioso il nipoteddru. L'avrebbe fatto seppellire anonimamente in terra consacrata. Dintra il tabbuto di un altro.

Peru has had a Japanese president (Alberto Fujimori). Britain had a Jewish prime minister, all of whose grandparents were born in Italy (Benjamin Disraeli). No one calls these countries "nations of immigrants." America has never had a president who wasn't, at least in part, of British ancestry, but people still babble that we're a nation of immigrants.

All of a sudden it dawned on me. I knew. I just knew. I was adopted, and my adoption papers were in there. If I were adopted, that would explain why I didn't look like anyone in my family, why I didn't act like anyone in my family, and why there were so few pictures of me. I wasn't Mom and Dad's real kid. I was an unwanted baby, or an orphan like Emily Michelle.