Ancestral Ties Quotes

The land was ours before we were the land’s She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people ...

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla.

When you meet kin, there is an energy and sparkle between your bodies. It must be chemical somehow - DNA and genes.

Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

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?

I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'

We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.

Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.

My mother was a Mohawk, born and raised on a reservation, and when I was a kid, she would take me there to visit her relatives.

This is our home and this is our country. Beneath its soil lie bones of our fathers; for it some of them fought, bled, and died. Here we were born and here we will stay.

My father's family is German and Czech.

I'd love to work more with the American Indians, my people.

There is an old guest house opposite my house, and grandsons visit from time to time from the U.S., every time grown up a little. I don't know whether the same grandchildren come every time or it is someone else.

Before this generation goes on to its ancestors, we should, we must, do our level best to pass on our lessons, so that they live in our people's minds and lives.

The ties of blood," said Spider, "are stronger than water." Water's not strong," objected Fat Charlie.

Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with Henry the VIII. On her father's side they date back further than Adam. On the topmost branches of her family tree there's a superior breed of monkeys with very fine silky hair and extra long tails.

I am descended from a very long line my mother once foolishly listened to.

The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body; it affects the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective spirit.

All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.

There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.

I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.

What connects me so strongly to Israel is the fact that I'm second generation. My parents said, "We have a place where we can just be ourselves and nobody says, 'Don't tell me your opinion, you damn Jew, go somewhere else.'" Then you go to this country and other Jews tell you to shut up. It's frustrating. I think that we have a bad government and that some people are fearful. They're going with the class bully. But I really truly believe - you read it in my stories - that deep inside, people have goodness.