Lost Heritage Quotes

My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.

England is a memory now. The gates are flooded and anybody can have access to England and join in.

When did America forget that it's America?

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Nobody in America, in the modern generation, has read their mythology or legends.

We're trying to plug a void and bring what's been missing back to hip-hop.

SAD, BUT ONE DAY OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TO VISIT MUSEUMS TO SEE WHAT A LADY LOOKS LIKE.

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected.

She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.

I'm German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn't exist any more.

I'm from New Orleans, and I have a French last name - although I have no real relationship with my last name because it's not my name. I don't know my name.

Every woman will tell the curious that with the disappearance of the spinning wheel vanished India's happiness and prosperity.

The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.

Let us pick up again these lost strands and weave them again into the fabric of America, sort out the music from the sounds and again respond to the trumpet and the steady drum.

Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage.

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

It can be lost, and it will be, if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded not as the supreme expression of our profound belief, but merely as curiosities in glass cases.