After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until…

There’s a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has...

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won’t be reversed: by now the Jonathan’s as much an American as I am.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this...

When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he...

It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.

Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it’s facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned...

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others...

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

Blood can help make family, but family often transcends blood.

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pristine pedigree, refined through ages of selective breeding and the occasional mercy...

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

You are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment

A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity

No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for...

Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.

I come from a long line of miserable people.

So a dog’s value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines – the particular dogs in their ancestry – and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog...

When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves…sometimes even physically.

By looking at the details of the DNA, it is possible to chart the flow of your ancestry from your ultimate grandmother to more modern times.

One woman is a tiny divine spark in a timeless sisterhood tapestry collective;All of us are Wild Women.

The Dominican Republic is my holy land, my Mecca.

The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

. . . she had prejudices on the side of ancestry; she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them.

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe...

Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the...

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.

Our names were made for us in another century.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been ‘sold’ to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was...

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.