Ancestor Quotes - Page 20

• When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Thinking, Views, People

  Interview with David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Mother, Father, Writing

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• Sometimes the ancestors deem certain information so important that they send it to the subconscious mind without being consciously asked.

  Luisah Teish

  Mind, Important, Information

  Luisah Teish (1985). “Jambalaya”, Harpercollins

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• Here I am on the shore of Brittany. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, hung, and smoke especially. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal--just as my dear ancestors did around their fires.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Strong, Fire, Light

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• What was life has crumbled. What was form, now falls away. Mortal chains unbind and the soul s free. May you find your way to the ancestors. May you find your path to the gods. May your bravery and courage be remembers in song and story, May your parents be proud, and ma our children carry your birthright. Sleep, and wander no more.

  Yasmine Galenorn

  Song, Children, Fall

  Yasmine Galenorn (2011). “Courting Darkness: An Otherworld Novel”, p.143, Penguin

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• Somebody would think I was trying to get favored treatment because my ancestors had the name Moon. And that's a joke.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Moon, Thinking, Names

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• In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.

  Jay Griffiths

  Buddhist, Believe, World

  "Songs and freedom in West Papua" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2011.

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• The house is made up of the spirits of our ancestors. Did you think they would lie idly by while we were under attack?" 'Cuz, yeah, didn't everybody's ancestors rise up and destroy enemies.

  Christine Feehan

  Lying, Thinking, House

  Christine Feehan (2012). “Christine Feehan's Drake Sisters Series: Five Novels and a Novella”, p.1245, Penguin

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• I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

  Agnes Varda

  Real, Grandmother, Twenties

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. October 1, 2009.

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• Don't be afraid of StarClan. They will understand about Brokentail. You will be honored by our warrior ancestors for your loyalty toy your Clanmates and for your endless courage. So many cats owe their lives to you. Cinderpelt would have died after her accident if you hadn't tended to her. And when there was greencough, you fought day and night.

  Erin Hunter

  Loyalty, Cat, Warrior

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• We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.

  John Dewey

  Practice, Liberty, Consciousness

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, James Gouinlock (2008). “John Dewey The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1925-1927: Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and the Public and Its Problems”, p.160, SIU Press

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• One of our needs in a very complex society, where we encounter more people every day than probably our ancestors encountered over their whole lifetime, is our need to very rapidly evaluate other people. And one of the most potent ways of doing that is through our automobiles. So, a car isn't just a thing. It's a set of symbols and associations that we have to figure out in order to understand how we navigate our social worlds with that car.

  Paul Solman

  Order, Car, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I never really knew about my ancestors until this year, when I learned that the name Cobain was Irish. My parents had never bothered to find that stuff out.

  Kurt Cobain

  Years, Names, Parent

  "Kurt Cobain: Lost Interview". Guitar World Interview, kuriakon00.tripod.com. July 22, 1993.

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• Why it is that animals, instead of developing in a simple and straightforward way, undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they often acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace ... To the Darwinian, the explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.

  Francis Maitland Balfour

  Science, Animal, Simple

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• I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Writing, Night

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• Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Book, People, Giving

  Interview with Pierce Freelon, blackademics.org. April 2007.

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• No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.

  Diana Peterfreund

  Kings, Past, Trying

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• Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.

  John Steinbeck

  Home, Independent, Other Worlds

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.499, Penguin

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• Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)

  Norman Doidge

  Past, Important Relationships, Haunting

  Norman Doidge (2007). “The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science”, p.243, Penguin

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• I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families--our ancestors--are our identities. Biology is destiny. I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either.

  Aimee Friedman

  Destiny, Thinking, Identity

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• And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

  Alan Moore

  Daughter, Mother, Children

  "Watchmen". Comic book limited series by Alan Moore, September 1986 – October 1987.

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• We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.

  Bill Bryson

  Doors, Years, Four

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.319, Lulu Press, Inc

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• This faith in themselves was in the hearts of our ancestors, this faith in themselves was the motive power that pushed them forward and forward in the march of civilisation, and if there has been degeneration, if there has been defect, mark my words, you will find that degeneration to have started on the day our people lost faith in themselves.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Faith, Heart, People

  Swami Vivekananda, Vivekananda Kendra (2009). “Swami Vivekananda's Rousing Call to Hindu Nation”, p.91, Vivekananda Kendra

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• Oh, no-" They weren't even on the runway, and Jonah's father was already immersed in his BlackBerry. "Remember those 'Live Large with the Wiz Generation' posters? Well, guess how that translates into Chinese- 'Jonah Wizard Makes Your Ancestors Fat'.

  Gordon Korman

  Father, Chinese, Generations

  Gordon Korman (2010). “The Emperor's Code”, p.112, Scholastic Inc.

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• There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.

  Eric Kandel

  Men, Animal, Ideas

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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