Honoring Ancestors Quotes

Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes.

People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.

Mankind, devising some consolation for the frail and precarious duration of human life, have thought by the erection of monuments to glorify the memories of their ancestors with immortal honors. Some have employed the vivid delineations and colors of painting; some have carved statues from lifeless blocks of wood; while others, by engraving their inscriptions deep on tablets and monuments, have thought to transmit the virtues of those whom they honored to perpetual remembrance.

Now it's dedicated to my grandparents and to both of my parents. The first book was dedicated to my mother so I thought maybe it was my father's turn, but then I realized that everyone would jump on that and assume I'd had some falling out with my mother, which is absolutely not the case.

I think, especially with my parents, I wanted to remember who they were. I wanted to remember all of it. I didn't want to purge myself of it. I wanted to remember it.

I was named after my two grandmothers - Julia Elizabeth.

I have a respect for family pride. If it be a prejudice, it is a prejudice in its most picturesque shape. But I hold it is connected with some of the noblest feelings in our nature.

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

I took my dad's name to carry on his legacy because acting feels like something I'm meant to do. I want to try everything.

To my mind, one does not put oneself in place of the past; one only adds a new link.

When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60's and early 70's, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors - bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother - to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who'd gone before us.