"You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive." — Salman Rushdie

No people whose word for "yesterday" is the same as their word for "tomorrow" can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.