Treading with Our Ancestors

Quote Unquote

By Moristotle

While working on the last two days’ poems, “For My Grandmother Effie” and “Grandmothers Galore,” I googled ancestor quotes. What follows is a short selection that seemed proximate to the path my mind was treading.

“We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”
    ― Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”
    ―Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

“Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many … can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference.”
    ―James W Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.”
    ―L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.”
    ―Tad Williams, Shadowrise

“No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The ‘I’ is chained to ancestry by many factors…This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.”
    ―Erwin Schrödinger

“I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow.”
    ―Francisco X. Alarcón

“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, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

Thanks for the internet