Quotes about Legacy

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.

It doesn't matter what Christ or Buddha said, it matters how they lived.

Most people die at age 25 and are buried at age 65.

. . . I hope that when you're my age, you'll be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom, we lived lives that were a statement, not an apology.

He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

A lifetime's knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

And yet a knowledge is here that tenses the throat as for song: the inheritance of the ones, alive or once alive, who stand behind the ones I have imagined, who took into their minds the troubles of this place, blights of love and race, but saw a good fate here and willingly paid its cost, kept it the best they could, thought of its good, and mourned the good they lost. (From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)

But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.

The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.