Intergenerational Quotes

“One can only go for so long without asking ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I come from?’, ‘what does all this mean?’, ‘what is being?’, ‘what came before me and what might come after?’. Without answers there is only a hole. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.”
― Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside

“We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In each generation, there is this certain wisdom of the ages that gets reburied in the fleeting drivelings of modernity; then, like a diamond in the rough, it is yet again unearthed by a very small minority who not only restores it but also polishes it and presents it as something new, something highly valuable and refreshing as understood by the current.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“There was a considerable difference between the ages of my parents, but this circumstance seemed to unite them only closer in bonds of devoted affection. There was a sense of justice in my father’s upright mind, which rendered it necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly. Perhaps during former years he had suffered from the late-discovered unworthiness of one beloved, and so was disposed to set a greater value on tried worth. There was a show of gratitude and worship in his attachment to my mother, differing wholly from the doting fondness of age, for it was inspired by reverence for her virtues, and a desire to be the means of, in some degree, recompensing her for the sorrows she had endured, but which gave inexpressible grace to his behaviour to her. Everything was made to yield to her wishes and her convenience. He strove to shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from every rougher wind, and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion in her soft and benevolent mind.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

“[Quoting her grandmother] 'We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation. I had little education, I wanted you to do better. Now you need to make sure your daughter has more than you had. Isn’t this the natural way of the world?”
― Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

“It’s no secret that kids thrive when they have meaningful conversations with caring adults.
But in our busy world, it’s not easy to find ways to make this happen, so I developed READ
TOGETHER/DO TOGETHER™ to help parents and grandparents create those magic moments.”
― Kate B. Jerome

“Lynda Johnson Robb: Children's books tie together the stages of life. You read them when you are eight or ten or twelve, and then they stay with you. I still have many books that I loved as a child and have kept; I read books to my own children; and now we will share books with my grandchildren.

...Children's books stabilize me, they are my roots; they help me in times of stress. They help me connect to happy memories, to those I love, to the generations in my family. They provide comfort.”
― Anita Silvey, Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book: Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life

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