Quotes about Ancestry

The family trees of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer are everywhere so laden with figures of accomplishment that one might expect future generations to be burdened by it all. But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seemed to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them.

No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.

I was told all my life I was part Cherokee. Then it was Crow. The latest is Blackfoot.

I heard stories from my mother's mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.

We must pray intently, in agreement with the appeals of our forefathers and predecessors, in order to see a continuation of what they birthed. And we must actively repent of our wrongs and theirs, allowing God to reach back in time, healing our history so that blessings can flow into our present.

Marrying a woman of priestly ancestry was a special blessing.

We all stand on the shoulders of the past generation.

I knew I must do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

As he walked back to the neighbor's he realized that the magic tricks he'd taught himself were childish foolishness. What mattered was the blood that ran through him, the same blood that had flowed through Maria Owens. Once, when he'd cut himself in a tangle of brambles on the way to the lake, drops of his blood had burned through the fabric of his shirt. This was what bloodline magic was. It was inside him.

Our mothers taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandmothers were old—for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added

And we kneeled down right on deck and gave thanks to God for letting us see the land for which our mothers and fathers cried — and lived and died — to see again

I was by myself in this frightening place and SHE WAS NOT THERE! my heart sank. I had never felt more alone in my life, and then, just when I was on the point of dying of loneliness and lack of direction, I wailed: ;I: Oh, Grandmother, you are not here! And she said: But you are.