Home > Topic > inheritors
1 " We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos. "
― Colin Meloy , Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles, #1)
2 " What I am trying to tell you,” Trinka said softly, looking back at him, “is that there are good ways to live, and bad ones. This is not a matter of opinion; it is objective truth. The Empire fights the Wilders because we need their land; that’s true. But there are other reasons. We fight them because they are unworthy. They are not fit to share this world – this divine gift – with folk who do not murder children. With people who do not rape women, or make slaves of the weak. The Wilders are undeserving of the gift of life, of divine choice. They are not fit to be called Children of Bræa. Their way of life is a blight upon the earth. They may look like men, but they live, and behave, like beasts.“If they were able to learn to live like civilized folk,” she sighed, “then we would make it our business to teach them; indeed, I would account it our duty to bring them into the light. We have tried. It has been more than a century since we first began settling the frontiers beyond the mountains, and in the three-score years since Duncala, we have tried many times to bring them the gift of civilization. But if they will not learn to act like civilized men, then civilized men are not obliged to tolerate them. The whole of Bræa’s creation, her divine intent, and her gift of choice to all of us – the gift of choice that grants us the possibility, and therefore the obligation, of bettering ourselves! – cries out against tolerating what by any reasoned definition is utter, bestial depravity. “We are Bræa’s heirs, the inheritors of her divine design. We are not obliged to endure depravity,” she said gravely. “We are obliged to redeem it, if we can; but if we cannot, then our obligation – to ourselves, our posterity, and the Holy Mother’s design – is to end it.” She cocked her head. “In this wise, it might help to think of the Wilders as little different from the hordes of Bardan, whose legacy of death and devastation ended the ancient world, and plunged all into darkness for twice a thousand years.” Her fist clenched involuntarily. “We will not suffer the darkness again, Esuric Mason. My brothers...my former comrades, I mean...they will not allow it.” She looked down at her hands. For a wonder, they were steady. “I will not allow it,” she whispered.- The Wizard's Eye (Hallow's Heart, Book II; Forthcoming) "
3 " When man comes to the realization that he is not the " favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution— We are not " fallen" angels, nor were we " created" perfect.On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry—the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth—from the worm to the dinosaur. "
4 " My dear Prue, we are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos. It is a hopeless task. "
5 " Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which civilization claimed to be based. The bargain, Rivers though, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies were founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns. "
― Pat Barker
6 " It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out. "
― Samuel Moyn
7 " Biblical interpretation is not a passive matter. It requires our own active negotiation. When we pretend that, deep down, all the voices are really saying the same thing and ought to be able to get along, we forfeit our responsibility as inheritors of this richly, sometimes disturbingly, contradictive literature. "
― Timothy Beal , The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book
8 " Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner. "
― David Mitchell , Cloud Atlas
9 " We are inheritors of progress, of a technological rebirth that had only ever been imagined before now. We don’t talk about it, but at some point, it became clear to me: I am the child of a bookless age. "
― Ashley Mansour
10 " Go & tell your drinking buddies& psychoanalyst your neighborhas risen from the ashes. I wonderif I should tell you about the love lettershidden behind the doorjamb. This housestill stands among my lavender flowers.Tell your inheritors to think of mewhen they smile up at the sky. "
― Yusef Komunyakaa , The Chameleon Couch
11 " Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes. "
― Tom Brokaw , A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope
12 " Chinese combatants, men and women, inheritors of a millennial culture, are people of uncommon intelligence and an invincible spirit of struggle. "