Go Tell It on the Mountain quotes about family & inheritance

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It has been so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

It was he who had told her to weep, when she wept, alone; never to let the world see, never to ask for mercy; if one had to die, to go ahead and die, but never to let oneself be beaten.

He knew only—and now, looking at his mother, he knew that he could never tell it—that the heart was a fearful place.

She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead.

For he had made his decision. He would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers. He would have another life.

What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they see.

His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.

This was the story of innumerable shepherds who failed, in their arrogance, to feed the hungry sheep; of many a father and mother who gave their children not bread but a stone, who offered not the truth of God but the tinsel of this world.

Then John knew that a curse was renewed from moment to moment, from father to son. Time was indifferent, like snow and ice; but the heart, crazed wanderer in the driving waste, carried the curse for ever.

Your Daddy beats you, she said, because he loves you.