Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don't even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.
Annie Lennox

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount, Jr.

To us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.
Chief Seattle

My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.
Elayne Boosler