#ancestors

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits. ↗

— Sallust

#concealment #descendants #distinguished #either #forbid

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for. ↗

— Henry Wiencek

#life #search #time #family

All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess) ↗

— Blanche Bachelar

#generation #love #paris #psychology #romance

When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves...sometimes even physically. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#ancestry #illumination #inspirational #journey #journey-in-life

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions. ↗

— Pete du Pont

#ancestors #been #both #business #come

My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave. ↗

— Paul Robeson

#baked #born #bread #crossed #delaware

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#ancestors #exhilaration #freedom #hands #into

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. ↗

— Helen Keller

#ancestors #had #his #king #slave

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties. ↗

— Pete Seeger

#ago #america #ancestors #came #dissenters

The people who have recently come to this country to work and better their lives should be given the same opportunities that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors were given. ↗

— Jose Serrano

#better #come #country #given #grandparents