Inheritance Quotes

“A tragic inheritance- seeing your mother’s flaws pop up in yourself and having the awareness to know it but no idea how to stop it.”
― Hannah Nicole Maehrer, Apprentice to the Villain

“Our descendants deserve libraries, not barracks. They deserve to inherit a world that values both their waking lives and their dreams.”
― Courtney M. Privett, Dustlight

“The ship you promised would come from Africa with money and an entourage has not arrived. The legacy hunters, just about cleaned out, have diminished their giving. Either I am mistaken, or the bill for our rare good fortune is about to arrive with interest.”
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All beneficiaries of my will, except for my freedmen, may inherit under this condition: that they cut my body into pieces and eat it with all the townspeople watching.
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We know that certain nations maintain the custom of relatives devour­ing their dead. In fact, the sick are often scolded for the deterioration of their flesh. For these reasons, I admonish my dear friends not to deny my request, but to eat my body with the same eagerness with which they prayed for it to die”
― Sarah Ruden, The Satyricon

“And thus the... valley became a garden again, and the inheritance, which had been lost by cruelty, was regained by love.”
― John Ruskin, The King of the Golden River; or, The Black Brothers, a Legend of Stiria. Illustrated by Richard Doy

“In addition to the physical aspects of the work, I'm here to recreate my own personal story, my own narrative. For years—a lifetime, really—when I thought about my life, I saw it through the lens of other people, usually my parents, sometimes my sib-lings. If they told me I was this, that, or the other type of person, I usually took their words at face value, even when the descriptions sounded negative, even when I fought their pronouncements. But translation is all about making decisions, hundreds, even thousands of decisions. Maybe a new way exists to look at myself, at my life. At long last, I’ll take those same words and events to come up with different meanings, different interpretations, ones I've reached on my own, stripping away others' interpretations of who I am. (9)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“The translator in me--always at work, even in English-wants to understand the intent of his words. This is where the meaning must lie, right? With the filters turned off, the translator's mind is unfettered by others' words, actions, or opinions, or even by their mere presence. (15)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“By this time, we had all slung so many words at each other. (62)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I feel powerless to make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be thrown out down here. (88)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my own way, maybe that's what I'm doing here, searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents' love for me, for clues to the puzzle, translations of their behavior toward me. (156)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translating. It’s exhausting (166).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translation involves more than the deciphering of words, words strung together in sentences, in paragraphs, in dialogue, in the years of a life. After all, a machine can do that if you feed all the data into it. Translation also involves making sense of what’s left unspoken, those ellipses, blank spaces, the dot-dot-dots when you have to guess what’s happening in the person’s mind, what the silent messages mean. It calls for the translation of surrounding events, the cultural context, as well as the translation of nonverbal communication. What was being said through that certain look, that ever-so-tiny smile, that flash of a grimace? That spark of anger? Those sarcastic comments? Those prolonged silences? What did it all mean? (249)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“The most difficult thing for me to translate to date, though, has been my own life (250).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Admittedly, a number of the translations of my life, of what went on in Ivy Lodge, are loose at best, warranting multiple-choice answers, never ideal in the scientifically based world of translation. You're supposed to go from the source language (the language being translated) to the target language (the language being translated into). A translation is only good when the translator knows--or can surmise--the intention of the person being translated, understands with a fair amount of confidence the exact meaning of that source language. Maybe that's one problem with my attempts to translate my family. Maybe my parents remained unclear in their own minds what they wanted to say, what their words and behavior meant, what their underlying motivation was. In that case, it makes translation doubly difficult if the source of the words and events to be translated is lost in a sea of linguistic confusion. Translators need patterns to make sense out of foreign words, or it all becomes a hodgepodge of meaningless sounds and symbols. Chaos (256).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“We keep telling ourselves, you’ll be so much happier when you find something better. And then we do find something better but still aren’t any happier. We get the dream home only to be overwhelmed by the mortgage, the dream job only to find that we now have no time to have friends or a social life. We get so loaded we don’t need to worry about money anymore, only to find that people are using us for our wealth, and our family is looking more forward to our death and their inheritance than they are to family time and our wellbeing. We realize that even after accomplishing our goals, we still have to face ourselves at the end of the day.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“He was glad of the smell of floor wax and fresh linen. But the room was full of dreadful religious artifacts. On the marble dresser stood a statue of the Virgin with the naked red heart on her breast, lurid, and disgusting to look at. A crucifix lay beside it, with a twisting, writhing body of Christ in natural colors even to the dark blood flowing from the nails in his hands. He looked at the bearded Jesus, the finger pointing to the crown of thorns around his heart. Maybe they were all crazy. Maybe he would go crazy himself if he didn't get out of this house.”
― Anne Rice , The Witching Hour

“The uniqueness of human beings, in the created order, is that we live simultaneously in nature (the realm of involuntary and repetitive acts) and history (the realm in which we make choices, and experience and reflect upon the consequences of those choices). Other living things -- plants and other animals -- live in nature only; angels, perhaps, only in history. To have this double inheritance is our challenge, our pain, but also our glory.

(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“English: "One becomes immortal when their thoughts would be accepted even by their murderer."

Česky: „Nesmrtelným se stává ten, jehož myšlenky by i jeho vrah přijal za své.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“English: "Every person is a co-author or descendant of a co-author of the work of the global brain."

Česky: „Každý člověk je spoluautorem nebo potomkem spoluautora díla globálního mozku.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“If an inheritance is not deserved in any way by the person who inherits it, this is a real theft and a great injustice!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“We want to pass things down. We want heirs, and if I cannot have heirs of blood then I want heirs of spirit; I want you, when you are grown, when I am gone, to have parts of me.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“Yes. Do pass it on. But not all of it. Don’t pass the pain on.”
― George Hammond

“Your kids are your priority, as they are the future of your genetics.”
― Steven Magee

“Through the storm of modern dilemmas, Donald Trump stands as the beacon of tradition, safeguarding our future and the sanctity of family, ensuring that the breath of freedom will be inherited by our grandchildren. His voluntary crusade against the tides of disruptive ideologies is not just leadership - it's a legacy in the making.”
― Guru Z.S. Gill

“Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but Diamonds is our inheritance.”
― Dipti Dhakul, Quote: +/-

“It’s often observed that individuals within the same family bear striking resemblances, passing down features such as the curve of a mouth or the hue of hair, even the warmth of a smile from one generation to the next. Curiously, though, mortals very rarely inherit the memories of their ancestors. This absence of memories makes it all too simple, at times, for one to overlook or disconnect from their heritage, as if the threads of lineage and legacy can be easily loosened by the passage of time. And the essence of one’s forgotten heritage continues to flow within each person’s veins like poison.
Excerpt from The Book of Betrayal, Müneccimbaşı Sufi Chelebi’s Journals of Mystical Phenomena ”
― Ova Ceren, The Book of Heartbreak

“It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth once they inherit it.”
― Kin Hubbard