Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

I take the sporting genes from my dad.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

You draw the best things from your parents and family. You're going to pick up some of the bad things as well - there's a temper that runs through my dad's side of the family that I'm not especially keen on picking up a giant block of.

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.

You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

My dad's side of the family ... they're a real bizarre bunch, going back to the original colonies. That side's got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can't remember when there was a sober grandfather.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

It's in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I'm clearly dramatic.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.

My father was always getting excited about something. It's genetically inside me somewhere.

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

I inherited depression from my mother's side of the family.

I've always had quite long canines. It's a very strange thing. My parents don't have them.

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

There are some people who're all doctors. Is it genetic?

It's a little bit in the genes because my brother is a journalist and my father was a sports writer.

If your parents didn't have any children, there's a good chance that you won't have any.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

In my family, we don't die till we're 100 years old.