#ancestor

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#ancestors #exhilaration #freedom #hands #into

My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him. ↗

— Immanuel Velikovsky

#ancestors #chapter #chosen #father #first

All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess) ↗

— Blanche Bachelar

#generation #love #paris #psychology #romance

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

#death #ghosts #grief #healing-the-past #loss

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

The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past. ↗

— Anita Desai

#back #backwards #begins #believe #book

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

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits. ↗

— Sallust

#concealment #descendants #distinguished #either #forbid

The people who have recently come to this country to work and better their lives should be given the same opportunities that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors were given. ↗

— Jose Serrano

#better #come #country #given #grandparents

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