quotations about ancestry & ancestors
Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.
GABBY RIVERA
America #7
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.
PLATO
Theaetetus
Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.
THICH NHAT HANH
The Art of Living
All blood is alike ancient.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
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
You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.
TOBA BETA
My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.
TANYA TAGAQ
Split Tooth
There's something about doing things the way our ancestors used to do them that kind of puts your heart back into the rhythm of this thing called life.
JOANNA GAINES
The Magnolia Story
Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors.
CHARLOTTE MACLEOD
The Corpse in Oozak's Pond
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain that Changes Itself
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
Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.
PAUL TSONGAS
National Journal, 1991
The fairest flower
That ever blossomed on ancestral timber.
W.S. GILBERT
Ruddigore
Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed to be possessed of supernatural powers which they did not enjoy in the flesh. They may also be dissatisfied or malignant in consequence of being suddenly deprived of life, and if they are neglected by the living, are apt to be revengeful. Therefore they must be cajoled and propitiated. Fear of beings belonging to a mysterious state or sphere of which he knew nothing continually haunted and terrified primitive man and induced in him what is known as "the dread of the sacred." It was every man's personal duty to attend to the demands or requirements of his deceased ancestors. At first he would succour his own immediate forebears with food and gifts; but it must have been borne in upon him that when his parents joined the great majority, the care of the spirits of their parents likewise devolved upon him... and, by degrees, he might even come to regard himself as responsible for the well-being of a line of spirit ancestors of quite formidable genealogy. These, through his neglect, might starve in their tombs; or, alternatively, they might crave his company. Because of vengeance or loneliness they might send disease upon him, for the savage almost invariably believes illness to be brought about by the action of jealous or neglected ancestors. The loneliness of the spirit-world is the dead man's greatest excuse for desiring the company of his descendants.
LEWIS SPENCE
British Fairy Origins
A plaited link exists between every person and his or her ancestors, not simply through genealogical records, but in the same manner that the soul of a child, from which we sprang from, traces a direct connection to the matured soul of the adult.
KILROY J. OLDSTER
Dead Toad Scrolls
The stream is brightest at its spring,
And blood is not like wine;
Nor honored less than he who heirs
Is he who founds a line.
J.G. WHITTIER
Amy Wentworth
Our ancestors are very good king of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN
The Rivals