Grandparent Quotations | Page 2

If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

Children exist in the world as well as in the family. From the moment they are born, they depend on a host of other 'grown-ups - grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold others who touch their lives directly and indirectly.

Black college-educated people got to where they are on the backs of domestic help, meaning their parents and grandparents. So people should not forget how they got to where they are.

It's amazing when you find a photo of your grandparents when they were young because it's black and white and the care that they put into their appearance back then was so grown up and specific to that era.

My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me.

Your grandparents did not endure the indignities of a steerage journey to Ellis Island so that you could stand outside a discothèque and beg a wallpaper designer to take you in with him.

My life is blessed; I have held my children's children.

What I'd like to do is be able to work with Democrats to reform current entitlement programs for future generations, grandfathering all the grandparents.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

When the grandmothers of today hear the word 'Chippendales,' they don't necessarily think of chairs.

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.

My mother was 45 when she had me, so when I was in high school my parents were the same age as my friends' grandparents.

Our parents, worse than our grandparents, gave birth to us who are worse than they, and we shall in our turn bear offspring still more evil.

It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.

I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and "wisdom" and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents.

Grandpa did everything at his own pace, a speed that my sister and I referred to as 'when snails attack.' ... My grandparents' house was only about ten miles from ours, but the ride there would necessitate sandwiches packed for the trip, and several books to keep us occupied.

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

I was an adopted child of my grandparents, and I don't know how I can ever express my gratitude for that, because my parents would have been a mess, you know.

I was raised by my grandparents, and they always made sure that I had a pencil and some paper, whether we were in the car or at a restaurant. While they were enjoying a nice meal, I would be sitting there drawing funny pictures of the waitress.

I love seeing young girls and their parents and grandparents at my concerts all loving the music from Grease when I perform those songs (and yes, I do perform a bunch of them!).

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.

The scariest time of my life was when I knew my Nana was dying. It was horrible, as there's nothing I could do to stop it. I grew up living with my Mum, brother and Nana (my mum's mum), so it felt like I lost a parent rather than a grandparent. It makes you realise the fragility of life.

Part of the American ethos is that you want to leave something better for your kids than you had and I know that my parents felt that way and I know that my grandparents felt that way and everybody worked hard so that their kids had a better chance. I just don't want to be the first generation that doesn't do that.

I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.

My grandparents are from Mexico, so I grew up with great Mexican food.

In a brief space the generations of beings are changed, and, like runners, pass on the torches of life.

I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.

Perhaps the old view of 'Me breadwinner, you hausfrau' worked for our grandparents, when people obligingly popped off before boring each other to death, but it won't work any longer because we are living too long and divorce is needed today to do what death acomplished more economically before.

I was born in Georgia. That's where my grandparents-and all my people-are from. But my family traveled a great deal because my dad was in the army as a helicopter pilot.

When I was 13 and 14, there were a lot of jokes about my bar mitzvah and my grandparents, and then when I got older, it became more about touching boobs and trying to get liquor. I kind of ran the gamut of infantile behavior and I haven't moved one step forward since.

The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought.

My grandparents on my mom's side played in a mandolin orchestra. So when I hear mandolins, I automatically think of them.

My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.

When I was a kid, all of the parents and grandparents came out of the Depression Era. They were all freezing bread in their freezer, they were covering their sofas with plastic, and they had plastic runners on the floor. There was a great distance between them and anything authentic.

I've been accused of being old before my time more than once. It's true that I've always felt an affinity for, and been comfortable around, older people. I attribute this to a childhood spent around my grandparents - and even a great-grandparent or two. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything.

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

Rich grandparents get more attention than poor grandparents.

You can't prevent a possible future closeness between your upcoming child and one or more of their grandparents.

It's one of the best programs I've ever seen because it benefits both sides: children, who need love, and grandparents, elderly people, who need to feel wanted.

I had such a great time doing commercials and things as a kid. My grandparents were on set with me all the time, and I loved that I got to hang out with them, so I will forever be grateful for that. But I just loved every minute of it.

I'd rather do manual labor than sit behind a desk. And as my grandparents got older, I'd fly out there and help out around the farm. We'd tear barns down; we'd build barns. I'd rather be outside rolling hay or driving the tractors.

Whereas our grandparents lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed Gallup polls.

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

It's interesting that I had such a close relationship with my grandfather. Because your parents always judge you: they say, 'You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that.' But with your grandparents you have a feeling that you can say anything or you can do anything, and they will support you. That's why you have this kind of connection.

It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.

Dear Grandmamma, with what we give. We humbly pray that you may live. For many, many happy years: Although you bore us all to tears.

My father grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with my grandparents. In Norwegian my name is pronounced 'Yoo' but my father used to call me 'Joe.'

We all know grandparents whose values transcend passing fads and pressures, and who possess the wisdom of distilled pain and joy.

Both of my grandparents died of lung cancer. So I got quite a lesson in the payback later in life of smoking, and if you keep it up how bad it can be.

to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.

My grandparents in Istria had a frasca, which is about the most basic kind of grocery/restaurant. They sold wine from their own vineyard. I took control of the vineyard, hired a local winemaker, and bought another winery in 1996. We had our first commercial vintage in 1998.

Didn't we, like our grandchildren, begin with a childhood we thought would never end? Now, all of a sudden, I'm older than my parents were when I thought they were old.

Every house needs a grandmother in it.

We'll probably live 20 more years than our grandparents did. The question is, what are you going to do with those extra 20 years?

When you hear about people in the '50s getting married at 20, you're like, What were they thinking? My grandparents were together for over 50 years.

No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.

I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.

Childhood was fairly solitary. I grew up in a very small town called Navan in County Meath. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant and I was left in the care of my mother and my grandparents.

It's funny what happens when you become a grandparent. You start to act all goofy and do things you never thought you'd do. It's terrific.

On the way to the delivery room, I almost changed my mind about having a baby. I wouldn't have found it so hard to go ahead with it if I had realized that having a baby was the only way I could ever become a grandmother.

There are many people who could claim and learn from their Indian ancestry, but because of the fear their parents and grandparents knew, because of past and present prejudice against Indian people, that part of their heritage is clouded or denied.

In many of my books, I explore the ways in which grandparents or other older persons are shaped by the young, and the young are shaped by the old, in an evolving dance.

You don't have to be in "Who's Who" to know what's what.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

Women are holding up the world. We're taking care our children and, very often, our parents and sometimes our grandparents.

My grandparents came worked hard, and I believe they never regretted their decision to come here and make a new start.

I know that some poor immigrants from that era had unrealistic expectations and were disappointed, but I don't think my grandparents were disappointed at all, even though they experienced some very hard times during the Great Depression.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

The nature of human beings never changes; it is immutable. The present generation of children and the present generation of young adults from the age of thirteen to eighteen is, therefore, no different from that of their great-great-grandparents. Political fads come and go; theories rise and fall; the scientific

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

I didn't know my grandparents. They were - my grandfather - my maternal grandfather died when I was five. I have very little memory of him. All my other grandparents were dead by the time I was of any age to remember anything.

Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

Unfortunately I don't have my grandparents, but Mum and I are working quite well together. That's candid, that's frank. Your grandmother is never going to lie to you.

I am the age of the some of the grandparents that are bringing their young grandchildren to hear the music. I have been fortunate enough to see multiple generations of families come see my shows.

We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.

One thing is funny because my grandparents are going to come see the show and my mom was concerned that they wouldn't understand, because so much of it is Internet-based. Our generation specifically really relates to it, because we were the first people to discover the Internet and most of us can maybe navigate the Internet better than our parents can. All this information you could ever possibly know is right at our fingertips, not to mention the fact you can meet anyone!

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

If you want to know where I come by the passionate commitment I have to bringing people together without regard to race, it all started with my grandfather.

So now I'm rollin' down Rodeo wit a shotgun, These people ain't seen a brown skin man, Since their grandparents bought one

I once walked in on my grandparents making love...And that's why I don't eat raisins.

Good old grandsire ... we shall be joyful of thy company.

Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping - they called it opportunity.

Grandparents are God's gifts to children.

Our mothers and grandmothers ... moving to music not yet written.

I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated.

A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight - or anything before midnight.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

A grandparent will accept your calls from anywhere, collect.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.

We have become a grandmother.

I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.

Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.

The closest friends I made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather.

In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.

Our land is everything to us.... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it - with their lives.

In a family, parents, grandparents and children feel at home; no one is excluded. If someone has a problem, even a serious one, even if he brought it upon himself, the rest of the family comes to his assistance; they support him. ... Should the same not happen in society?

The people that does not care for its children or grandparents is a people that has not future. Because it doesn't have the strength or the memory to go forward...