Grandfather Quotations

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.

My grandfather was a voodoo priest. A lot of my life dealt with spirituality. I can close my eyes and remember where I come from.

My grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes.

In my grandfather's lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.

Alzheimer's is a devastating disease. It was painful for me and my family to watch my grandfather deteriorate. We must find a cure for this horrible disease.

My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life.

I met Patricia Neal, John Houseman. But I loved my grandfather because he was this kind, talented man.

My dad recently reminded me that my grandfather's cousin was Lefty Frizzell.

But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

My grandfather, a devout Christian, had the gift of healing.

My grandfather was a chef for a Baron in Sicily before he came to America. I grew up with him. I used to do my homework at one end of the kitchen table while he cooked at the other end.

My grandfather Frank Lloyd Wright wore a red sash on his wedding night. That is glamour!

One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age - at the age of 38 in fact - he changed course and decided to become a doctor.

I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.

More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather.

My daddy was a minister, my grandfather was a voodoo priest, my uncle was a mason; I was raised with a lot of studies.

Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.

My great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, was my biggest hero in life, my biggest inspiration behind everything I do.

I have family in Ponce. It's a shame that my grandfather passed and I wasn't able to be there with him.

My grandfather was a faith healer and medium, and he always encouraged faith in the unseen. I believe in fortune tellers.

For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.

Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation's out of breath. We ain't running no more.

I'm from Chicago. My grandfather was a policeman, and my aunts are married to policemen.

This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.

My great-great-grandfather Julius founded the Communist Party in New York.

My grandfather, in 1848, had fled from Germany to find political freedom in the United States.

I was taught by my grandfather that anything that your mind can conceive, you can have. It's a reality.

The truth is that my grandfather was quite wealthy, a shipbuilder.

As my Sicilian grandfather used to say, you get more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?

I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.

We will never forget those like my great-grandfather who fought at Vicksburg.

As a fluke, my great-grandfather hit one of the largest oil reserves in California.

When my first child was born in 1962, I wrote a letter to my grandfather telling him how happy I was but how concerned; concerned because there were so many visions which were not very good.

My grandfather on one side was trained as a cabinetmaker but eventually worked as a coachbuilder and then built cars. I inherited from him a love of cars, but with no technical ability whatsoever, sadly!

My great-grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario, and he was also an Edwardian spiritualist researcher who was very interested in what was going on in the invisible world, the survival of the consciousness, precipitated paintings, mediumship, and trans-channeling.

My grandfather played a mandolin, so I got my hands on that. Then on down to a banjo, and I found I couldn't play any kind of soft or mournful music with that so I took up the fiddle in my late 20s or early 30s - and that was far too late. But it keeps me off the streets. It has been a love of mine since I was 17 maybe.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

My grandfather was a movie producer, and so I grew up on movie sets.

I do everything I do to pay tribute to my great-grandfather.

My grandfather was Orthodox, and he was religious, but neither of my parents were. Of course, as they got older, it seems like they get more religious the older they get, even though they're still not practicing Jews.

My dad had been an actor... not only had my dad been an actor, but his dad had been an actor, and my great-grandfather had been an actor. And who knows before then?

My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic.

My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.

My grandfather built my first hoop. It was a peach basket up against a tree, and we played in the dirt. I couldn't have been more than 6 when he put it up, and I just started playing.

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.

My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.

You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.

My grandfather was a cop in Long Island. I often try to draw on things that I've heard about him.

I was told by my grandfather who was a minister that we all were put here on earth to be of service to one another, and it is quite gratifying to know that if I am able to be of help to one that is not able to help themselves then I am fulfilling my obligation as a human being.

My mother's side of the family was in the production side of theatre. My grandfather, Jose Vega, was a general manager for Neil Simon shows on Broadway.

Always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said: 'A truck!'

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor, and we were very wealthy.

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.

My grandparents went through a bad experience themselves; they invested money in a church and got burned - the pastor had his own agenda - and my grandfather lost interest in the church after that. That was when I had the option to not go. 'Grandpa ain't going; I'm gonna stay with Grandpa.'

Going back to Georgiana Drew and John Drew, and my great-grandfather Maurice Barrymore, and it was such a sort of circus of odd, interesting people that loved acting.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

Who wants to be married to a grandfather?

I'm luckier than my grandfather, who didn't move more than five miles from the village in which he was born.

My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know?

I was getting worried I may not become a grandfather, but the Lord has blessed me.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

My great-grandfather, like many, came to this country in search of the American dream.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.

In Hawaii, there are 50-year-old grandfathers, because they got married so early.

You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.

Ironically, I come from a family of lawyers - my dad, my grandfather, and now my oldest son. And some of my very best friends are lawyers, though they don't resemble the ones that appear in my novels.

My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher.

My grandfather was a provider. Work, any kind of work, was the joy of his life. So I grew up having a certain relationship to work. It was something that I always wanted.

Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.

My dad graduated seminary there, and so did (sounds like) Mark Kimball's grandfather. They sang in a quartet together, my dad and Mark Kimball's grandfather.

Today is my grandfather's birthday." "How old is he?" "Sixty-three. It's hard to believe he was once a human being.

My grandfather has been very depressed lately. He just doesn't know what to do. He says it's late in the game, and he's afraid that life has him beaten." "Tell him to take out the goalie.

Books were not looked upon as things unobtainable due to economic circumstances or class status. My grandfather stole an entire set of Dicken's from the local library.

Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.

My grandfather taught me how important it is to have your eyes open,because you never know what's going to come your way.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

I want to appreciate you now, and avoid the rush.

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

I'd like to credit my speed to my grandfather. But he was also a quiet player. He didn't talk much. He just went out there on the field and did his own thing.

I have four kids, seven grandkids, and four great-grandkids. Maybe I can become a great-great-grandfather if I hang on!

I have a ranch in Montana, but it's not a real working ranch. I've always liked the outdoors. I come from Texas. My grandfather was a farmer; that's as close as I come.

My grandfather had been a well-known judge in Berlin.

There was once an old sailor my grandfather knew, Who had so many things which he wanted to do That, whenever he thought it was time to begin, He couldn't because of the state he was in.

My grandfather is the king, my Dad's the prince, I guess that makes me the butler.

I want to make the most out of the word ‘fame.’ I want to do good things with my fame, or whatever it is. I want to help and do charity work. There’s something going on in Chile right now with the water, so I think I’m going to down there in a month to help out. My grandfather worked with charities his whole entire life, and we grew up living with him. He always told me about the other side of the world and everything that’s going on.

History is as Old as My Grandfather

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

Playing with my grandfather, grandmother and my parents, I came to music pretty naturally.

My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. It was a sin to even pluck your eyebrows, and they thought it was a sin for me to be there looking like Jezebel.

I'm pretty blessed when it comes to clear skin. I owe that to being Cape Verdian. My whole family has great skin. My grandfather is 80 but doesn't look a day over 50. And we all love the sun, too, so blessed is an understatement!