Heir

Famous quotes containing the word heir:

    We do the same thing to parents that we do to children. We insist that they are some kind of categorical abstraction because they produced a child. They were people before that, and they’re still people in all other areas of their lives. But when it comes to the state of parenthood they are abruptly heir to a whole collection of virtues and feelings that are assigned to them with a fine arbitrary disregard for individuality.
    Leontine Young (20th century)

    To die, to sleep—
    No more, and by a sleep to say we end
    The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
    That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
    Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
    To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
    Must give us pause.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “Five o’clock tea” is a phrase our “rude forefathers,” even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completely is it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for “all the ills that flesh is heir to,” the glorious Magna Charta.
    Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)