Quotes About Ancestry

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

Genealogy was her favorite insanity.

if you wish to represent your county in Parliament, as has been done by your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandfathers; if you wish to keep a house over your head, and to leave Greshamsbury to your son after you, you must marry money.

For obvious reasons the Catholic aristocracy was heavily intermarried.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.

for nobility is excellence of race.

It's like this, when you live in a place you've always lived in, where your family has always lived. You get to see things not only in space but in time too.

My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went.

Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.

Perhaps we should move backward with courage, so as to understand what we really came from and who we were.

You see, I come from Mezritch, though I grew up in Mazapevke, but Vorotolivke is where I'm still registered.

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

Aber wenn das menschliche Schuldgefühl auf die Tötung des Urvaters zurückgeht, das war doch ein Fall von 'Reue', und damals soll der Voraussetzung nach Gewissen und Schuldgefühl vor der Tat nicht bestanden haben? Woher kam in diesem Fall die Reue?

Their lesson was simple: our lives are nothing without our past, without our history, without our culture, without our culture and old stones. It all matters, because it gives meaning.

It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors

It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.

But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.

From the Ylfing lineage came Eirik the Eloquent.

Skelfir was a warrior king whose lineage is called the Skilfings, who hold sway in the eastern regions.

TEIRESIAS: You have your eyes but see not where you are in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing you are enemy to kith and kin in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.

you brought my sperm rising back, springing to light fathers, brothers, sons—one murderous breed— brides, wives, mothers.

Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.