Willa Cather Quotes

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

I should thank my parents for my beauty. It's in my genes.

Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.

I believe that just as everyone inherits a particular form so does he inherit the particular characteristics and qualities of his progenitors, and to make this admission is to conserve one's energy.

How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

Children inherit the qualities of the parents, no less than their physical features. Environment does play an important part, but the original capital on which a child starts in life is inherited from its ancestors. I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.

I look a lot like my father when he was my age.

People ask me 'Are you copying your dad?' It is in my blood. I have got royal blood coursing through my veins. I can't help myself doing what my father did.

the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.

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

You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

If you want to stay young-looking, pick your parents very carefully.

You draw the best things from your parents and family. You're going to pick up some of the bad things as well - there's a temper that runs through my dad's side of the family that I'm not especially keen on picking up a giant block of.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

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.

It has been said that a man of genius should select his ancestors with great care - and yet there does not seem to be as much in heredity as most people think. The children of the great are often small.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.