quotations about ancestry & ancestors
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
LIAM CALLANAN
The Cloud Atlas
You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.
TOBA BETA
My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
JAMES G. LEYBURN
The Scotch-Irish: A Social History
Ancestral glory is, as it were, a lamp to posterity.
SALLUST
Jugurtha
Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.
SUZANNE COLLINS
Mockingjay
There's something about doing things the way our ancestors used to do them that kind of puts your heart back into the rhythm of this thing called life.
JOANNA GAINES
The Magnolia Story
Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.
TAD WILLIAMS
Shadowrise
A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?
WALLACE STEGNER
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
All blood is alike ancient.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
He's a chip o' the old block.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
A Match at Midnight
If there be any good in nobility, I trow it to be only this, that it imposeth a necessity upon those who are noble, that they should not suffer their nobility to degenerate from the virtues of their ancestors.
BOETHIUS
De Consolatione Philosophiae
It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Emily Climbs
Nothing like blood, sir, in hosses, dawgs, and men.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Our ancestors are very good king of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN
The Rivals
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Somehow I've always had a sort of sneakin'
Idee that peddygrees is purty much
Like monkeys' tails--so long they're apt to weaken
The yap that drags 'em round.
ROBERTUS LOVE
The Boy from Hodgensville
The stream is brightest at its spring,
And blood is not like wine;
Nor honored less than he who heirs
Is he who founds a line.
J.G. WHITTIER
Amy Wentworth
Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.
THICH NHAT HANH
The Art of Living
Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!
EMIL M. CIORAN
Drawn and Quartered