Quotes About Ancestry

Should I restrain this shadow—my mother, all our female ancestors—or should I let her go?

Okay. Now, don't let any of this lower your mirth index. Think of Tamerlane." My grandfather used to comfort my mother, during her childhood, by reminding her that they might have been related to Tamerlane. "Okay," I said, though I had never seen how Tamerlane helped anything. "Remember, you have the best heart and mind, and whatever you do is right. Bye-bye, my sweet. Don't forget the fruit group.

On language—from the mother tongue came our father's sins.

Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.

He could feel his father's history like ruts worn deep in the road.

A thousand years of dominion went ringing across the Thames like a trumpet blast. Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Norman ancestry combined in a chord that had deafened and conquered nations. It expected the moon to bow the knee. If not, so much the worse for the moon.

Posterity is the patriotic name for grandchildren.

I'm a real Swede! In fact, I'm a quarter Finnish.

I'm a quarter Indian; my grandfather's originally from New Delhi.

My maternal grandmother was Cantonese, so I'm a quarter Chinese and half Irish and a quarter Scottish and raised by English parents living in Scotland.

I don't know whether I'm half, quarter or what. I just know I'm aboriginal.

My dad, who likes genealogy, knows who was the first guy that came from France in 1655, and the guy settled in Montreal, and Montreal is an island where the city is in Quebec.

My family is from Elmhurst, Queens, 54th Avenue, but I was born in Northern California.

It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.

For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the best criteria by which to judge our fellow humans.

I come from a line of railroad men. My great-grandfather was a surveyor for the Burlington Railroad.

My family is Native American, and I was raised with Native American ceremonies.

I'm part Maori. My mum's Maori, and she raised me. And my grandma, she's Maori.

I was bred as an outcast, part Negro and part Seminole, in my early years raised as an Indian.

I was basically raised to look for chances to get even with several families for stuff that happened 30 or 40 years before I was born.

As I grow older, I have a growing curiosity about my other half. My dad did a wonderful job raising me, and I wouldn't change it for the world, but at the same time there is a growing curiosity about my other half.

In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.

I was a class clown. My father was a class clown. My son has been a class clown, and it sort of ran in the family.

My father, John, ran the Dowd Insurance Co. in town, which was started by his great-grandfather. My mother, Dolores, was a homemaker who kept an eye on all of us.