Ancestor Quotes - Page 25

• She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

  Angela Carter

  Eye, House, Doe

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• This morning, Tegus welcomed me again with an arm clasp and cheek touch. I wasn't startled this time, and I breathed in at his neck. How can I describe the scent of his skin? He smells something like cinnamon-- brown and dry and sweet and warm. Ancestors, is it wrong for me to imagine laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes and breathing in his smell?

  Shannon Hale

  Sweet, Morning, Eye

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• To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.

  Alice Walker

  Pain, Mean, Fighting

  Alice Walker (2011). “Alice Walker: Collected Poems: Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990”, p.87, Hachette UK

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• After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts - like a Chinese nest of boxes - oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front - in our ancestors, back and back until.

  Walter de La Mare

  Lying, Men, Chinese

  Walter de La Mare (2013). “The Return”, p.85, Courier Corporation

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• Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.

  Elliott Sober

  Hands, Live For Today, Example

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  War, Germany, Legs

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• I'd always wanted to believe that my ancestors were better people than they probably were. - Princess Emma

  E.D. Baker

  Believe, Princess, People

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• It all began when... they're funny, those words. Everyone uses them, without thinking what they mean. When does anything begin? With everyone it begins when you're born. Or before that, when your parents got married. Or before that, when your parents were born. Or when your ancestors colonised the place. Or when humans came squishing out of the mud and slime, dropped off their flippers and fins, and started to walk. But all the same, all that aside, for what's happened to us there was quite a definite beginning

  John Marsden

  Mean, Thinking, Parent

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• And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

  Ted Hughes

  Real, Rivers, People

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• My ancestors were all Freethinkers, formerly Catholics. It was science and Darwin, in particular, that made them decide, as educated people, which they were, that the priest, nice as he was, didn't know what he was talking about.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Nice, Talking, People

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• We must strive to become good ancestors.

  Ralph Nader

  Environmental, Stewardship, Strive

  "The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap". Book by Ralph Nader, 2004.

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• When we respond to threats immediately and take action right away, it's usually the threats that we're hard-wired to respond to, the kinds of things that our ancestors survived.

  Al Gore

  Action, Kind, Threat

  Interview with Andrea Mitchell, www.nbcnews.com. 2013.

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• Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone - no ancestors, no fellows, no successors.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Stand Alone, Presidents Day, Type

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.675, Library of Alexandria

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• In the history of the world the Vedas fill a gap which no literary work in any other language could fill. I maintain that to everybody who cares for himself for his ancestors for his intellectual development a study of the Vedic literature is indeed indispensable.

  Max Muller

  Intellectual, Vedas, Who Cares

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• The US is also unusual in the enormous scale of religious fundamentalism. The impact on understanding of the world is extraordinary. In national polls almost half of those surveyed have reported that they believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man shares no common ancestor with the ape. There are similar beliefs about the Second Coming.

  Noam Chomsky

  Religious, Believe, Men

  "Global Warming and the Future of Humanity: An Interview With Noam Chomsky and Graciela Chichilnisky". Interview with C.J. Polychroniou, www.truth-out.org. September 17, 2016.

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• Those who depend on the merits of their ancestors may be said to search in the roots of the tree for those fruits which the branches ought to produce.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Roots, Tree, Merit

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• Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

  Carl Sagan

  Thinking, World, Belief

  Carl Sagan, Jerald F. TerHorst, Allan J. Mayer, Sharon S. McKern, Laurence J. Peter (1980). “Broca's brain: reflections on the romance of science”

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• Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

  Mary McCarthy

  Atheist, Eye, True Life

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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• For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Years, Mammals

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• People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Hurt, People, Comfort

  Maxine Hong Kingston (2014). “The Woman Warrior: Picador Classic”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

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• When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. ... Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.

  Nhat Hanh

  Spiritual, Blood, Jewels

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• I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands.

  Ariel Gore

  Christian, Positive Thinking, Hands

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• Some people don't mind a little constitutional sophistry in a good cause; and for liberals, centralizing all power in the federal government is always a good cause. Since most Americans don't know or care what the Constitution says, let alone what their ancestors thought it meant, the great liberal snow job has been very successful.

  Joseph Sobran

  Jobs, Successful, Government

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• I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

  John Shelton Reed

  Hands, People, Black

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• [Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.

  Lin-Manuel Miranda

  Song, Writing, Mean

  Source: deadline.com

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