Family History Quotes

“The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can't quite bear to look at. I like other people's things better. They come with other people's history.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“Fritz Kramer said, “I cannot see why my treatment of my Chinese workers as equals should cause any German, American or British person any concern.”
― Michael G. Kramer, His Forefathers and Mick

“Knowing your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“It’s important to teach our children their heritage. Who are your ancestors? What were their traditions? Each of us has a story to tell. If these stories are unwritten, then how are your children going to know of their parentage?”
― Linda Weaver Clarke

“Destiny doesn't always come when it's convenient or when you think it should. It comes when you're ready, whether you know it or not.”
― Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King

“I knew, deep down, that I was different from my family. I knew just by looking in the mirror.”
― Alex Dalton, A View From The Mountain

“....though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.

"To understand history," Chacko said, "we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells."...

..."But we can't go in," Chacko explained, "because we've been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
― Arundhati Roy

“She listens to the history of her painting read aloud in court and finds it hard to associate her portrait, the little painting that has hung serenely on her bedroom wall, with such trauma, such globally significant events.”
― JoJo Moyes, The Last Letter from Your Lover

“An overnight success is usally twenty years in the making!”
― T.I. Wade, Banking, Beer & Robert the Bruce

“Jesus. Save me from the nice and sincere boys who feel things too deeply. I still think what happened is funny in its perfect awfulness, but I understand his shame too. It's hard to come from someplace or someone you're not proud of.

"You're not your dad," I say, but he doesn't believe me. I understand his fear. Who are we if not a product of our parents and their histories?”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“When we see what blood we spill, we call out to the gods, but they have forsaken us. We shout to the ancestors; only the sound of the waters answers back. We are left to the mercy which we have for each other.”
― Calvin Baker, Naming the New World: A Novel

“Not knowing the DNA we carry in our bodies, hearts, and minds. does not negate it. We are an accumulation of many people, even more so when unaware of it. Once aware, we can choose what to carry and what to relegate to history.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“We remember through our songs and stories," Sincha said, looking contemplative. "Our ancestors should not be forgotten.”
― T.J. Klapprodt

“The names of families are the front doors of history.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“But inheritance doesn't come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.”
― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance

“This is the truth. My family comes from a long line of women whose heartbeats sound like a needle run out of vinyl.”
― Yolanda J. Franklin, Blood Vinyls

“Let it pass, let it pass. Hopefully Gilligan will escape again and then he’ll forget about the wretched lettuces.”
― Lynne Christensen, Aunt Edwina's Fabulous Wishes

“Religious and social tradition has been replaced with current fad and the opinion that the past isn’t needed. We have become a people from nowhere in particular and disconnected from each other. In gathering the past, we remember ourselves and can forgive the members of our history for their shortfalls.”
― Eric overby

“skeletons in the closet can be found everywhere. They may seem shocking initially, but they will be a colorful addition to any welcomed genealogist.
- Jacquelyn Nicholson, Genealogy Made Easy, 2nd Edition”
― Jacquelyn Nicholson

“Yes, American history is complicated and hard. All history is complicated and hard. Human life, past and present, is never simple. Every family history is checkered, to some extent, and with great inheritances come humbling challenges. But I believe Americans are brave enough to face those challenges, to overcome adversity, celebrate our triumphs---to be a teachable people who learns from our history and goes confidently into the future with, as Lincoln said, "malice toward none and charity for all.”
― Kristi Noem, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland

“We went to the cemetery that day, resolved to confirm once and for all the truth of the story that great-great-grandmother Nicolasa was buried alongside Gregorio the priest.”
― Renato Cisneros, Dejarás la tierra

“...I had the feeling that Gregorio was everywhere and nowhere, that he was a vaporous presence, as if he hadn't died altogether and was perhaps not outside of me, but inside of me, not in any tangible sense but not in a merely spiritual one either.

We like to think that ghosts inhabit old houses and dark corners, but we too in our body and soul become these very things: an old house, a dark corner, a storehouse for the memories of the people who preceded us and whose rest we eventually decided to disturb.”
― Renato Cisneros

“- Får jag påminna dig om att du inte ens kände honom för några dagar sedan?
- Det är mitt blod som rinner i hans ådror, så om jag säger att han är genom hederlig ber jag dig att inte tvivla på det”
― Marc Levy

“My dad’s conflict had not ended when he left the battlefield. It continued on forever inside him, sending shockwaves into the hearts and souls of his family.”
― Ruth Clare, Enemy: A True Story of Courage, Childhood Trauma and the Cost of War

“She walks the same paths where her father walked, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather before her. She passes by familiar trees, the towering silent witnesses to over two centuries of history. Many of these majestic woodland giants, like faithful old friends, proudly bear the telltale tap-marks, remnants of a multi-generational maple harvest.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“When I asked Grandma about it she told me in her own way . . .she wanted me to know that each time I looked at my quilt it would remind me to be compassionate with other and identify with their struggles. I remember her exact words, same ones she repeated so many times: "Chile, Grandma never wants you to look at the bad in folks and go backwards. I wants you to look at the good in them and go forward. If you jest look at the bad you gonna fine zactly what you lookin' for. Even the worse folks got a speck of good, you jest gotta fine it.”
― Phyllis Biffle Elmore, Quilt of Souls: A Memoir

“...[T]hose now in the grave... once held her in their arms as their hope and the hope of their house...”
― John Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale

“everything has changed, but we need to nurture ourselves with the pride and remembrance of those who once contributed so much to a way of life that our mothers and fathers wanted for us, and what gave us the desire to raise our family in Carlsbad, with that said gives us the gratitude of being able to continue and desire to stay and raise our families and to the next generation _levipaultaylor”
― levi paul taylor

“As a mom, I feel compelled to ask questions. Why are girls demanding the drug testosterone in skyrocketing numbers? Why are so many young girls and women getting mastectomies? What is happening when the young woman’s scarred mastectomy chest is glorified? Why is there a new industry profiting from removing any traces of femininity of our daughters? Why is this drastic medicalized trend rushed, creating a destructive trans train that roars fast and furious, ignoring the whole person, their history, and their family?”
― Lisa Shultz, The Trans Train: A Parent's Perspective on Transgender Medicalization and Ideology

“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”
― Carmel Mc Mahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History