Life & Wisdom Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Genealogy is supposed to be the sober accounting of bloodlines and documents, yet Bradley’s anecdote lands like a small social prank: the punchline is the Mayflower. “Cousins in the ninth degree” is comically remote, the kind of relation that changes nothing about daily life, but it gets alchemized into instant significance the moment it touches an American origin myth. That shift is the point. She’s showing how quickly we trade real intimacy for narrative prestige, how a flimsy thread of shared ancestry can feel more “real” than years of chosen friendship because it comes with a sanctioned story attached.

The phrasing does extra work. “A friend of ours has a hobby” makes the discovery sound casual, almost accidental, as if history simply wandered into the room. That offhand tone mirrors the way many people treat heritage as a delightful accessory rather than a hard truth: something you can put on when it flatters you. “We found out” invites the reader into the thrill of revelation, while quietly dodging the arbitrariness of the metric. Ninth-degree cousinhood is basically a rounding error in the human family tree; the Mayflower is the brand name that makes the math matter.

Coming from a writer steeped in retellings of myth and lineage, the line reads as meta-commentary: ancestry functions as plot. It’s a reminder that in American culture, being connected to the “right” past can still operate like a social credential, even when the connection is vanishingly small and the relationship is purely symbolic.