To acknowledge our ancestors ...

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.
 Alice Walker

Quotes from the same author

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.
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 Alice Walker
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
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 Alice Walker
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
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 Alice Walker
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
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 Alice Walker
I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.
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 Alice Walker