Ancestry Quotes

“I had nature in my heart, she said. Like she did, and her mother before her. There was something about us---the Weyward women---that bonded us more tightly with the natural world. We can feel it, she said, the same way we feel rage, sorrow, or joy. The animals, the birds, the plants---they let us in, recognizing us as one of their own. That is why roots and leaves yield so easily under our fingers, to form tonics that bring comfort and healing. That is why animals welcome our embrace. Why the crows---the ones who carry the sign---watch over us and do our bidding, why their touch brings our abilities into sharpest relief. Our ancestors---the women who walked these paths before us, before there were words for who they were---did not lie in the barren soil of the churchyard, encased in rotting wood. Instead, the Weyward bones rested in the woods, in the fells, where our flesh fed plants and flowers, where trees wrapped their roots around our skeletons. We did not need stonemasons to carve our names into rock as proof we had existed.
All we needed was to be returned to the wild.
This wildness inside gives us our name. It was men who marked us so, in the time when language was but a shoot curling from the earth. Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“Every life holds an epic tale, even if no one alive remembers it.”
― Greg Melville, Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries

“You feeling the thing that in my mother, and her mother and hers, calling to the thing that is you, and in your daughter (...), and in her daughter and hers.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“Her true skin color was a light beige, like the skin of pencil shavings, and was soft as it was when her mother lotioned her before bed every night. Stephanie did not have the memory of those nights, but they were the reason she subconsciously pumped two servings of shea butter before she sleeps. Mothers lived in a child forever, the way their own mothers lived in them. With one mother’s kiss, a child received a recipe made by a thousand seasoned souls—a generation of love transferred in everything a woman did.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“The house stood high on the peninsula of Vaucluse, three stories tall with a turret on one side. It had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jess's great-great-great-grandfather arrived in the colony of New South Wales, and had been featured in several glossy books about architecture that her grandmother kept open on the display tables in the library. Inside it was entirely unpredictable: unexpected doorways led to hidden staircases that wound around brick chimneys and allowed a person to arrive in a vastly different part of the house from that which they'd left.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Something about it could say something about himself. Where did that burning flame inside of him come from? His continuous grudge and his eagerness to feel resentment, how easy it was for him not only to like something, but love it as if his life depended on it? He needed to know the History. He needed certainties about questions he had about himself—whatever certainty it was. Maybe understanding where all of that came from would make it hurt less. He needed to know his truth.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, Dona

“I think a lot of people are moving toward the conservative movement because we’re realizing that our grandparents had these very beautiful values that gave us a lot to look forward to.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“We are much more than a mouthpiece for a culture,
We are much more than a showpiece of our ancestry.
I am not saying that we gotta cut off our roots,
But we mustn't let roots become chains of slavery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amor Apocalypse: Canım Sana İhtiyacım

“Es zählt nicht, wo was ist. Oder woher man ist. Es zählt, wohin du gehst. Und am Ende zählt nicht mal das. Schau mich an: Ich weiß weder. woher ich komme, noch wohin ich gehe. Und ich kann dir sagen: Manchmal ist das gar nicht so schlecht.”
― Saša Stanišić, Herkunft

“So, what are your thoughts about this symbol, Kate?" he asked mildly.
"Well, you see, the picture jarred my memory. Actually, I can't believe that I forgot---but, then again, I was just a wee thing at the time."
"Forgot about what?" he asked impatiently.
"My mother's book!"
He eyed her warily, recalling at once the book he had seen the Count DuMarin's veiled daughter, Lady Gabrielle, holding tightly to her chest on the night she had been handed over into the watchful care of Captain Fox.
Rohan had assumed it was a Bible.
"My mother brought a book with her from France containing this same symbol!" Kate explained. "It was a big thick tome, with all kinds of strange symbols and diagrams and writings. It had little maps and puzzles of different sorts figure out. Back when I was a little girl on my father's ship, my parents were constantly poring over it."
He frowned.
"Rohan, it was all about Valerian the Alchemist!" she exclaimed. "I don't know if the book was by him or simply written about him, but it contained clues to the secret location of his tomb. They were on a treasure hunt!"
He narrowed his eyes. The Alchemist's Tomb? But it had passed into legend long ago.
"Alchemy---you know!" Kate was saying excitedly. "Changing base metals into gold? There was supposed to be a horde of hidden treasure buried with him.”
― Gaelen Foley, My Dangerous Duke

“...I had the feeling that Gregorio was everywhere and nowhere, that he was a vaporous presence, as if he hadn't died altogether and was perhaps not outside of me, but inside of me, not in any tangible sense but not in a merely spiritual one either.

We like to think that ghosts inhabit old houses and dark corners, but we too in our body and soul become these very things: an old house, a dark corner, a storehouse for the memories of the people who preceded us and whose rest we eventually decided to disturb.”
― Renato Cisneros

“It isn't wrong to think about your ancestors, to hear their stories and understand where they came from. And if your ancestors have been in the United States or Canada for a long period of time, it is possible that there is a Native ancestor back there. And if you have a Native ancestor -- somebody who married or moved out of their community by choice or by force -- it is understandable that you would want to know more about them, more about how they left and why...they didn't return to their communities and instead remained among the colonists....Our ancestors' communities are not always our communities, but we can build relationship with each other and honor our ancestors in that way.”
― Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

“A name is a profession and a confession. It is an acknowledgment that we were powerless over our family lineage.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“The dead want what they want. Even an ocean away, there was no denying them.”
― Victoria Costello, Orchid Child

“We can't expect roots to ground us, magnificent birds to surround us...or flowers to bloom from our deeds- without first planting the seeds.”
― Selin Senol-Akin, Earth Up Your Roots

“Fools seek identity in ancestry, the wise build their identity with sweat and blood.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“Today wasn't the first time that Jasmine had sensed something supernatural within the palace. With so many storied figures having lived and died between these walls over the past centuries, it was only fitting that they would make their presence felt. She recognized them in the strange ring of light that sometimes skimmed across a sculpture of one of her ancestors in the Hall of Monarchs, or when her pet tiger, Rajah, would suddenly look up and growl at thin air--- as if seeing something that shouldn't be there. Eerie as it was, she had always found it strangely comforting to live with ghosts in her midst. It meant that even in her solitary childhood, she had never been alone.”
― Alexandra Monir, Realm of Wonders

“The living need no ancestral consent on how to think, feel and behave.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“The living need no ancestral consent
on how to think, feel and behave.
Each generation must carve their life
based on new reason of their time,
while in heart their feet are firmly rooted.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“We must remember our ancestors and humble ourselves.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“DNA test may reveal your ancestry, but there is no DNA test for character.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“You must leap. You must do as your people did. You must sink in order to rise.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend

“In some East and Central African beliefs, the dead are part of dimensions of the past. The sasha are those who exist in the recollections of their loved ones. As long as one is remembered, one lives. When a sasha's last surviving loved one passes away, they become part of the zamani, the true dead. But when our names are spoken and when our stories are told, we are always here, abiding in the minds of our descendants, whether they are kin by blood, or by belonging.”
― Kalela Williams, Tangleroot

“You must first say, I am, before others will say, you are.”
― Dr. Sheka Hassan Kanu

“Each culture is a library of life lessons, where every generation leaves behind its pages for the world to read.”
― Colin Green

“DNA & Race (Sonnet)

Ancestral roots count for nothing,
modern humans are identified by behavior.
In the end, all roots lead to Africa -
transcending roots we lay the human culture.

Beyond markers of immediate biological family,
DNA ancestry tests are practically meaningless.
There is no genetic test for ethnicity -
science declares sanctions on racism, not validation.

There is no White DNA, Black DNA.
There is no Muslim DNA, Jewish DNA.
There is no Aryan DNA, Dravidian DNA.
We're made of stuff of the stars,
why do you still rot in the jungle gutter!

If you are seeking validation
for your bigotry and prejudice,
all we scientists can offer you are
directions to the nearest psychiatrist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Beyond markers of immediate biological family, DNA ancestry tests are practically meaningless.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“We aren't responsible for the sins of our parents. And neither must we bear their pain. This doesn't mean turning our backs on our forebears. We can send our love back to them, across the centuries. But on their behalf and ours, we can follow the bittersweet tradition, and transform their troubles into something better.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“This is what Ireland does. It calls her children home.”
― Amy Harmon, What the Wind Knows

“Some stories were planted before you were born. Your task isn’t to own them—it’s to help them bloom.”
― Lawrence Nault