Lucille Clifton Quotes

But I think it's important that things endure.

What is well rooted cannot be pulled up. What is firmly grasped will not slip loose. It will be honoured from generation to generation.

Some things never die, and they often get way better.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

We think continuity's important.

People who have gone, are still here, in us. Places we came from, are carried to the places we go.

Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

That lasting things do, in fact, last.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.

Nothing fine and noble will ever perish from the earth as long as there are hearts to remember.

On great fields something stays.

I hope that my family will continue in another thousand years.

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

A cello was there 400 years ago and will still be here in 400 years.

For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

I have not lived so abundantly, full of family, full of continuity and history.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

It's a wonderful feeling being a bridge to the past and unite generations.

It was so strange. I knew that Josephine Baker had performed on the same stage but that night I felt it. Many of the same people who worked with Josephine Baker are still here. They know what they're doing. And that was a very comfortable feeling.