quotations about ancestry & ancestors
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
LIAM CALLANAN
The Cloud Atlas
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
PLUTARCH
On the Training of Children
Here and there a cotter's babe is royal-born by right divine;
Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Emily Climbs
A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?
WALLACE STEGNER
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
He's a chip o' the old block.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
A Match at Midnight
Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.
GABBY RIVERA
America #7
Now, when lesser folk would wither, thou must be true to the blood of thine ancestors. Much greatness is bred in thee; accept now this terrible mantle and take a step nearer thy destiny.
ROBIN JARVIS
The Oaken Throne
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain that Changes Itself
Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.
PLATO
Theaetetus
Ancestral glory is, as it were, a lamp to posterity.
SALLUST
Jugurtha
It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
It's the land of my ancestors. I need to set my feet on that soil and see how I feel.
RUTH BEHAR
Lucky Broken Girl
He who boasts of his descent praises the deeds of another.
SENECA
Hercules Furens
Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.
SUZANNE COLLINS
Mockingjay
We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.
TANYA TAGAQ
Split Tooth
Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors.
CHARLOTTE MACLEOD
The Corpse in Oozak's Pond
Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!
EMIL M. CIORAN
Drawn and Quartered