The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past. Shirley Abbott
About This Quote

If one has little, they find the resources in the past to learn how to care for their future. This is one of the attitudes that can be traced back to frontier days. When there was only so much land, when resources were scarce, it became important for people to remember what came before them and look forward to what was next. We cannot forget the past because it makes us who we are and gives us a foundation from which we can build a future. We should not take advantage of our past, but use it as a foundation from which we can build a better world for others to come after us.

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South

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More Quotes By Shirley Abbott
  1. 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.
  2. The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty...
  3. If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.
  4. Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas, terrapins, catfish--anything that...
  5. Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered.
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