#ancestor

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

#life #search #time #family

When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves...sometimes even physically. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#ancestry #illumination #inspirational #journey #journey-in-life

With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench. ↗

— Jim Walsh

#american way #ancestors #arms #came #died

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#again #ancestors #ancestry #black #forced

Just because I don't believe in YOUR God doesn't mean I don't believe in God. I just choose not to be bound by the limits of your imagination or those of your ancestors. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#god #imagination #limits #religion #experience

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors. ↗

— Thomas B. Macaulay

#bear #before #below #century #cheerfully

We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us. ↗

— Liam Callanan

#death #ghosts #liam-callanan #the-cloud-atlas #death

My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions. ↗

— Elayne Boosler

#ask #because #directions #even #forty

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#bacteria #cells #colony #creatures #each

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors. ↗

— Edsger Dijkstra

#am #ancestors #cultural #derive #feeling