Mailloux Genealogy Quotes

All of our ancestors give us the precious gift of life. Do we use it wisely? Do we use it well? Do we make a name for ourselves and for our children of which we can be proud? ~ Laurence Overmire

Because of the earth's roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the "authors of our days" – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don't agree? ~ Andre Breton

I trace my genealogy back to the land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and place. Our genetic makeup is not so different from the collared lizard, the canyon wren now calling, or the great horned owl who watches from the cottonwood near the creek. Mountain lion is as mysterious a creature as any soul I know. Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance? ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Our stories make us who we are. And each story has its own purpose and its own reward. Each story rings true and each story is worthy of the ages. There is no such thing as an insignificant life. ~ Laurence Overmire

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to. ~ Orson Scott Card

Following Nietzsche's arguments concerning the genealogy of the word "good"(and "evil"), one could also say that the main difference between "masters"and the "herd" (as the new masters) is that masters are the ones who "give names" (and can thus say "this is so-and-so") whereas the "herd" fights for the -interpretation- of these names ("this -means- so-and-so"). Yet this interpretation is itself a form of mastery, and is often much more tyrannical than the act of "giving names". ~ Alenka Zupančič

Hat the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we lived. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage. ~ Ellen Goodman

All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder. ~ Lucy Knisley

My lord said, amongst other things, that he did not propose to burden the doctor with the details of his genealogy. He consigned the doctor and all his works, severally and comprehensively described, to hell, and finished up his epic speech by a pungent and Rabelaisian criticism of the whole race of leeches. ~ Georgette Heyer

We are all the product of things we've never seen and people we never met. In fact, if just one little detail had been changed in their lives, we may not even exist! ~ Melanie Johnston

The story of his great-grandfather ... was his own story, too. ~ Kelly Cherry

The sacrifice our ancestors gave yesterday
Gave us today and our tomorrow ~ Stephen Robert Kuta

The crisis of history in France, is a crisis of social bond, a crisis of citizenship. A citizen is the heir of a past more or less mythified, but he makes his own, whatever his personal genealogy. Today, under the pretext that the country has undergone considerable changes, some would like to transform the past in order to adopt it to the new face of France. Nothing, however, will make the past anything other than what it was. To pretend to change history is a totalitarian project: One who has control of the past has control over the future, one who has control over the present has control over the past, as George Orwell wrote in 1984. ~ Jean Sevillia

The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted. ~ Tariq Ali

Some of us are given more time on this Earth than others, but none of us should ever take the gift of life for granted. If we strive to be the best we can be, committing ourselves to what is right and true, while helping others along the way, then we will leave our own story worth the telling and be a shining example for our children and our grandchildren and all those great, great, great, great grandchildren in those far off times to come. ~ Laurence Overmire

The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do. ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind. ~ Charles Darwin

Your ancestors are rooting for you. ~ Eleanor Brownn

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story , you, upon hearing the words 'soccer' and 'neighbor' in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say, not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories. ~ Garth Stein

We are just stars in our family's constellation ~ Stephen Robert Kuta

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others. ~ W. H. Auden

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Genealogy Is Not A Reunion Of The Flesh,But It Is A Discovering Of The Spirit ~ Mark Darville

We are all descendants of murderers and thieves. ~ Amanda Sledz

My forebears played a significant part in making me who I am. I honor their legacy. I will never forget what they gave me. I will love them until the day I die. And no one can take them away from me. ~ Laurence Overmire

Genealogy: research by nobodies tracing their descent from a line of nobodies. ~ Stephen Gard

Put it on record
--I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
--I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a quarry.
I have eight childern
For them I wrest the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the rocks
And beg for no alms at your doors,
--Lower not myself at your doorstep.
--What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
--I am an Arab.
I am a name without a tide,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
--My roots
--Took hold before the birth of time
--Before the burgeoning of the ages,
--Before cypess and olive trees,
--Before the proliferation of weeds.

My father is from the family of the plough
--Not from highborn nobles.
And my grandfather was a peasant
--Without line or genealogy.
My house is a watchman's hut
--Made of sticks and reeds.
Does my status satisfy you?
--I am a name without a surname.

Put it on Record.
--I am an Arab.
Color of hair: jet black.
Color of eyes: brown.
My distinguishing features:
--On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh
--Scratching him who touches it.
My address:
--I'm from a village, remote, forgotten,
--Its streets without name
~ Mahmoud Darwish

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy. ~ Harvey Weinstein

The pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful. ~ Amin Maalouf

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is
almost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensible
to the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clear
conscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselves
to death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – that
On the Genealogy of Morality
42
48 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.
49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4.
50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7.
is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-human
proposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as people
say, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act out
a 'demonstration' of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is what
the oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment,
too, has such very strong festive aspects! – ~ Friedrich Nietzsche