Quotations: Personal Favorites

The central organizing principle in the discipline of genealogy is the reconstruction and analysis of kinship. ~ Carolyn Earle Billingsley

It is better to be liked for the true you, than to be loved for who people think you are.

It's better to BURN OUT than fade away . . .

So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key. ~ Eagles' song lyric

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. ~Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. ~ C.S. Lewis, (1898-1963)

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. ~ William James

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous. ~Shana Alexander

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical. ~ G. K. Chesterton

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. ~ Marston Bates

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

History" isn’t just what happens in the past,” but what we choose to remember. ~Paraphrased from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in We’re No Angels, by Kathryn Harrison (2007)

If you don’t know your history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ~ Michael Crichton, from "Ancestry Weekly Journal," 1 October 2007 (email newsletter)