Shirley Abbot Quotes

In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

I think these people have betrayed or have forgotten their ancestors.

In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.

I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.

Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.

Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry

For those things which were done either by our fathers or ancestors, and in which we ourselves had no share, I can scarcely call our own.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

My family have been around Northumberland for five generations.

Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.

Never underestimate how history injects itself into the present.

Don’t choose a straight path. And don’t reject a winding one. Choose the path your ancestors have trod.

We French are colonized by the cruelest master of all. We are colonized by our past.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

There is a strong propensity in the human mind to trace up our ancestry as to high and as remote a source as possible; and if our pride and our ambition cannot be gratified by a real statement of facts, fable is substituted for truth, and the imagination is taxed to supply the deficiency.

I am not myself, I am the result of all my ancestors.

History is the most dangerous substance that the chemistry of the intellect has created…. I makes men dream, intoxicates them, breeds false memories in them, aggravates their responses, takes up their ancient grievances, torments them in their sleep, carries them into the delirium of grandeur or else of persecution, and turns nations bitter, intolerable, and vain.

Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.