#ancestry

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#ancestry #emotional #feel #get #i

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves. ↗

— Jay-Z

#ancestry #art #fathers #inspiration #art

When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he loved her and how many years he spent without her after her death, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through just one letter without an onslaught of tears. And it was Grandpa, a voice I knew so well. One that I miss terribly. ↗

— Kara Martinelli

#friendship #longing #love #wwii-history #death

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea. ↗

— Mick Taylor

#ancestry #back #enough #far #go

Our names were made for us in another century. ↗

— Richard Brautigan

#freedom #names #time #freedom