33 quotes found
“Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothin...”
“When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I sto...”
“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts like a Chinese nest of boxes oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front in our ancestors, back and back until...”
“Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood ...”
“All modern humans are related to what scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve." This refers to our common matrilineal ancestor. She lived approximately 200,000 years ago and depending on how you estimat...”
“In Sri Lanka, when two strangers meet, they ask a series of questions that reveal family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrive at a common friend or relative. Then they say, "Those a...”
“The family trees of all of us, of whatever origin or trait, must meet and merge into one genetic tree of all humanity by the time they have spread into our ancestries for about 50 generations.”
“Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.”
“A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and train...”
“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.”
“There is no nobler profession, nor no greater calling, than to be among those unheralded many who gave and give their lives to the preservation of human knowledge, passed with commitment and care f...”
“Our names were made for us in another century.”
“So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file ...”
“After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country ral...”
“The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow.”
“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port”
“Falsehoods, rob the good in the hood, of the good wood. The good wood, that the good in the hood are descended from, is their birthright.”
“My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural histo...”
“No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be th...”
“Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology o...”
