Top 100 Quotes About Family History
#1. You cannot go to the cemetery and ask to be enlightened on matters of this kind, though it would ease my mind considerably if you could.
William Maxwell
#2. My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
Donald Tusk
#3. My mother was always deeply attracted to anything medical, and I think she would have loved me to have been a doctor. My father was in the army for 21 years, came out just before I was born. There was no history of showbusiness on either side of the family, but they were completely supportive.
Lindsay Duncan
#4. My brother's researched our early family history. He found a letter from a fella who said he used to be in love with my mum.
Paul McCartney
#5. This tottered ensign of my ancestors
Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea
Whereof we got the name of Mortimer,
Will I advance upon these castle-walls.
Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,
And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!
Christopher Marlowe
#6. In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.
Megan Smolenyak
#7. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.
Adam Sisman
#8. An overnight success is usally twenty years in the making!
T.I. Wade
#9. It was always so important to my dad for us to understand about the Genocide and to know about our family history.
Kim Kardashian
#10. There are things in life that science will never be able to see. We have to rely on what has been passed from our ancestors, generation to generation.
Pawan Mishra
#11. Your family's history does not have to be your future legacy!
Jayce O'Neal
#12. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.
P.J. Parker
#13. I don't have the best family history heart-wise, so I really try to keep my heart strong.
Kelly Ripa
#14. Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.
Rachel Holmes
#15. If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
Madeleine L'Engle
#16. I almost fainted. There was no family history. I had been eating a vegetarian diet and I exercised.
Rue McClanahan
#17. With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before - simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.
Sol Luckman
#18. The desire to be and have a sister is a primitive and profound one that may have everything or nothing to do with the family a woman is born to. It is a desire to know and be known by someone who shares blood and body, history and dreams.
Elizabeth Fishel
#19. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
Jesmyn Ward
#20. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Louis L'Amour
#21. The course of George St. Leger Grenfell's life was a continuing act of violence against the sanctities of Victorian life, and especially against its inmost essence, the family. And indeed, the large Grenfell family was an overpowering aggregation, even by the ample Victorian standard.
Stephen Z. Starr
#22. It's easy to discount family. It's easy to take them for granted. But your family is your history. Your family is part of who you are.
Sophie Kinsella
#23. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#24. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.
P.J. Parker
#25. Family isn't a matter of history. Or biology," he said softly. "It's a matter of choice.
Courtney Milan
#26. We're remembering each other's heroes, too. We are learning each other's songs. We are reminding ourselves that we are a global family praying together. We're all trying to live in the light of the history that shines through the biblical narrative.
Shane Claiborne
#27. 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
#28. My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.
Patricia Polacco
#29. It reminded me that they [the students] were more than just their scholarly shortcomings and gripes about the workload. Each had a history, a set of problems. Each, for better or worse, was anchored to a family.
Wally Lamb
#30. I miss the days of burning your kind at the stake. For generations we have settled for financial ruin and ostracization of your whorish ancestors - but know this, I will personally gut you and put your head on a pike in my parlor.
Heather McVea
#31. Mr. Speaker, we have reached a point in history where some have forgotten that it is the family, not the government, that is the fundamental building block of our society.
Jim Ryun
#32. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#33. God is the Lord of human history and of the personal history of every member of His redeemed family.
Margaret Clarkson
#34. Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole's Aunt Patti was the last woman standing.
Liz Rosenberg
#36. It hit me then that my family is gone, really gone, and even though I have ll these kids, they'll never know my family, so in a way they'll never know me, because they don't know me with my family. I don't have a context for my children.
Martha Moody
#37. Ambivalence about family responsibilities has a long history in the corporate world.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#38. When I was a boy, I would ask about my family history, about my bloodlines. We really didn't know that much. We had a little Indian in us from the Oklahoma Trail of Tears.
Brad Pitt
#39. I'd never be more than a toy to him, and the men in his family had a history of breaking their toys.
They just did it in different ways.
Joanna Wylde
#40. Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or notice him it will be a sign that he has forgotten, after all, who his father is.
N. T. Wright
#41. With my history, unfortunately, with my family suffering through gun violence, it's something that I feel passionately about, that even though the odds are certainly always uphill, that doesn't mean that I will stop fighting to try to change that.
Carolyn McCarthy
#42. it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?'
Strike thought of his own bizarre family history.
'Probably,' he said.
Robert Galbraith
#43. Destiny doesn't always come when it's convenient or when you think it should. It comes when you're ready, whether you know it or not.
Kelly Thompson
#44. The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
Siri Hustvedt
#45. To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not.
Julene Bair
#46. All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.
Karen Chamberlain
#47. New York has an amazing history of farming and fishing that goes right back to the Pilgrim Fathers. At its core are the four seasons, which are distinct, well-established and similar to those in Lyon, where my family lives: when it's snowing in New York, a week later it will be snowing there.
Daniel Boulud
#48. We live in a complicated society, Bromley - one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering?
P.J. Parker
#49. When you read the history of the human family, it slowly comes to you that all the world's oceans once fell as tears.
Paul Lutus
#50. I think some of my darkness comes from my dad. There is definitely convict history on that side of the family, a lot of dodginess. But with the darkness can also come entrepreneurialism, genius traits.
Rebel Wilson
#51. History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill
Ron Mayes
#52. If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.
Herman Melville
#53. Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#54. Languages have complicated family trees, you know - mixed marriages, stepchildren, even bastards. There are countless scandals in the history of languages, many murders, much incest.
Lauren Kate
#55. The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.
Sol Luckman
#56. And me having kids, with my family history? My mom: mentally ill, shot and killed her last husband. My father: six ex-wives, four heart attacks. Both of my parents think alcohol is a food group.
Christopher Titus
#57. Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.
Bruce Feiler
#58. I think when somebody goes to the movies and they spend their money and they take the girl out, the family, they want to have a good time. You don't always want to be hit over the head with history or how bad society is.
Ice Cube
#59. My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.
Tamara Tunie
#60. A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
James G. Leyburn
#61. The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.
Bruce Feiler
#62. I'm allergic to family occasions. Sometimes I think we'd do better as dandelion seeds-no family, no history, just floating off into the world, each on our own piece of fluff.
Sophie Kinsella
#63. You mustn't throw them away. Let me have them.
Diane Samuels
#64. I guess she was a life line
Sewing our family fabric together
From me to dad to her
Gave me a sense of continuity
Especially when my daughter was born
As she was slipping away
Richard L. Ratliff
#65. You are you because you love the way the world looks through your camera. You are you because of the way you love your friends and family. Not because some scar is on your body. That's a part of your history and what helps form what you believe in. not what defines you.
A.M. Willard
#66. One regret I have: I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids.
Robert De Niro
#67. The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
Anita Desai
#68. When it comes to politics and elections, far too many Christians spend more time appealing to family, history and tradition, culture, racial expediency, and personal preference than they do to what the Bible teaches.
Tony Evans
#69. Who we are takes generations to create and doesn't end with death.
Stanley Siegel
#70. Garbage is the part of your history you don't want your family to know about.
Vik Muniz
#71. He made my mom call and tell Maureen I wouldn't be in to see her anymore. He said therapy is a waste of money. He also told her to upgrade the cable service and to order him a subscription to Military History magazine. The he went and bought a new fishing pole for Matt, who is dead.
Tracy Bilen
#72. I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.
Kim Edwards
#73. Her name was a joke, she said, like Karen Cutter's family nick-naming her Cookie, or poor Marie Antoinette Jones, whose parents had liked the sound of the name but who were a tad weak in French history.
Miriam N. Kotzin
#74. My mom started an air-freight company; my grandmother built a golf course. I have a certain degree of entrepreneurial risk-taking in my family history. Maybe that eventually rubbed off on me a little bit.
Brian Acton
#75. When I turned 30, due to my father's heart history and my family genetics, I vowed to start seeing a cardiologist every year and just really be proactive and take my own heart health into my own hands.
Jennie Garth
#76. He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [ ... ] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]
John Burnside
#77. The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.
Sonia Sotomayor
#78. It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.
Aimee Friedman
#79. It sounds funny to say, but we saw [Kate's wedding to Prince William] as just a family wedding. And actually, I didn't realize - perhaps - the scale of it until afterwards. We all took on the roles as any family would.
Pippa Middleton
#80. There were history's gifts to my family-and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?
Malcolm Gladwell
#81. I'm the fourth generation to be in show business. It's pretty neat; it's nice to have that family history.
Rachel Bilson
#82. I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?
V.S. Naipaul
#83. If you're looking for family entertainment, don't study history or prehistory.
Peter Frost
#84. These secrets came down my own ornately curved and twisting family line. For family stories are never as direct as history books, and therefore they are more true.
Liz Rosenberg
#85. A lot of what's been written about me is not true: of my family history or my choices or my interests. Actually, I've never read anything written about me that was true. It's been completely crazy.
Lana Del Rey
#86. I have not lived so abundantly, full of family, full of continuity and history.
John Lone
#87. I never imagined that divorce would be part of my life history or my family's legacy. When people say that divorce can be more painful than death, I understand why. But like any great trial, God uses everything for good, if we allow Him to heal us.
Kristin Armstrong
#88. The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern.
Alice Morse Earle
#89. L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.
Kim Gordon
#90. At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.
Mike Jay
#91. When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.
John Sedgwick
#92. Mythology and history are my passion. I grew up in a religious family and learnt about our scriptures and philosophies. It's the language I'm comfortable with.
Amish Tripathi
#93. We may be of the same family, but that is the very reason why we are not friends, for we are rivals for the throne. What quarrels are worse than family quarrels?
Philippa Gregory
#94. It's so hard to believe that someone might want me - all of me - fucked-up sexual desire, tangled family history, book-hoarding tendencies, everything.
Lilah Pace
#96. I am thinking of our family's women
as faraway bulbs, their history
with crippling loss, and
how I am pieced together, shell and sand,
from the spine of their collective strength.
Jerrold Yam
#97. I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#98. I don't have a long family history of good cooks in my family.
Bobby Flay
#99. Suddenly, in my mind I hear my father say, 'Mind over matter, son. You can do this. You can accomplish anything as long as you really want to.
Marc Ashton
#100. The family is the engine that drives civilization. Throughout history, those cultures that have failed to found their rules and attitudes of society on the central importance of the family unit have decayed and disintegrated.
Jeremiah Denton
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