Quotes about Legacy

We ourselves respect the past in certain instances and in all cases grant it clemency, provided it consents to being dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack and try to kill it.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

Her image of it came entirely from what she had heard. Or read. Or received unconsciously from distant ancestors. And yet it lived within her.

At the end of our lives we all ask, did i live? Did i love? Did i matter?

To be truly happy and fulfilled, you must be working toward accomplishing something that is bigger than yourself, and that makes a difference in the life or work of others.

With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years.

Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters, of a fraction of a dot...our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe - are challenged by that point of pale light.