Grandparents and Ancestors

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son’s age.

My grandkids say, 'Reality Bites.' O.K., but it also challenges and rewards...I believe our best days are yet to come.

I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

 

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

They told him that their ancestors had fled the disorders of Ch’in times and, havingtaken refuge here with wives and childrenand neighbors, had never ventured out again; consequently they had lost all contact with the outside world.

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

“My uncle always was respected;

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning.

Soon the birds and ancients

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.

While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.”

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

[ Of the Black Death :] How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

As generations come and go, / Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; / Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, / And feeble, of themselves, decay.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

Blood's thicker than water, and when one’s in trouble / Best to seek out a relative’s open arms.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents’ belief in phrenology seems now to us.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.