Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
My dad's Macedonian, mum Greek... so for as long as I can remember, my uncles have talked about our warrior blood.
My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.
Posterity is the patriotic name for grandchildren.
True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible. We cannot go on nursing grudges even vicariously for those who cannot speak for themselves any longer. We have to accept that we do what we do for generations past, present and yet to come. That is what makes a community a community or a people a people-for better or for worse.
Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. Everybody comes from somewhere.
Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also.
I have an evolving relationship with my father, and his memory, especially the older I get. I know that some of the things that interested him are things that interest me.
The flame of family can warm us and at the same time be a perpetual pilot light to rekindle us.
Idea of the generations continuing is really important. And that's interesting to me. I write about families; I'm interested in families. Even though I think a family can be just two people or two people and a dog, I really wanted children for that reason.
Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.
My mother was Indian, brought up in Delhi. My grandparents were born in Bow and Poplar.
There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.
The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.
What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.
Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.
Oddly enough, my mother was born in Southampton. I have roots in Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor. My grandfather, her father, Stefano Rullo, when he came from Naples, he went to Pennsylvania and worked coal mines.
There are some things we really need to take care of: the children, and grandparents. Children, whether they are young or older, they are the strength that moves us forward. We place our hope in them.Grandparents are the living memory of the family. They passed on the faith, they transmitted the faith, to us.
I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.
I grew up in the same place as my mother, seeing the same trees my mother saw when she was at work; the flowers I picked were the flowers that my grandma planted. We have different styles; I wouldn't make the same clothes that my mum made, or my grandma, but we have the same taste.
Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
The little religion that I have clung to-that what matters most is the continuity of life, and its improvement from one generation to another.
I had an experience that probably is shared by many parents. When my daughter was born, I felt viscerally connected to generations before and after me in a way that took me by surprise.
We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children.
