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Grandmother Quotes

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Grandmother Quotes

“I was raised by a single mom who had to put herself through school while looking after two kids. And she worked hard every day and made a lot of sacrifices to make sure we got everything we needed. My grandmother, she started off as a secretary in a bank. She never got a college education, even though she was smart as a whip. And she worked her way up to become a vice president of a local bank, but she hit the glass ceiling. She trained people who would end up becoming her bosses during the course of her career.”

“When my grandmother died, I realized that even if I had millions of dollars, I couldn't find her anywhere on earth. My next thought was that I would die. I looked at my life and thought, "I'm afraid to die." I concluded that whether I was afraid or not, I would die. It was one of the most important crossroads in my life, once I realized that no matter what, I would do this thing, the next step was to think, "If I am going to do the most difficult and frightening thing - dying - is it possible that I could do some difficult and impossible things that are good?"”

“My father was only born something like 30 years after the Civil War ended, 35 or 40. He was born closer to that than the era in which he died. He was born in 1891, no television, no phones, barely any electricity. He wrote a book to all of us that was really just a compilation of the letters that he had written over the years to my grandmother when they were courting, in the horse and buggy era. Everybody said, "When did you have time to do this?" Relating their own lives to his. He said, "What do you mean, when did I have time? This is all we did." There was no TV, none of that.”

“It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different. Now I understand that I've gotten to enjoy things that others have not, whether it's the laughter, the poetry of my Spanish language - I love Spanish poetry, because my grandmother loved it - our food, our music. Everything about my culture has given me enormous education and joy.”

“You have to understand that I'm a child of the second generation, which means my mother was in Auschwitz, and the aunt of my mother was in Auschwitz with her; my grandmother and grandfather died there. So yes. All of those gestures they work for you, or for them, to fill their time or not feel their anxiety. But the child feels everything. It doesn't make the child secure. You put the child in a jail.”

“I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person. People's parents die at various ages, but my father died of mortality. He died of being an old person. Illness and stuff happened, but essentially, he was old and he was going to die.”

“I am the first one in my family to go to college and I felt a great responsibility when I was at school, because my family was making so many sacrifices for me to be there. I was raised by a single mother, my grandmother got on the plane and helped me move to New York and moved me into the dorm. It was just a big moment, and, yes, it was my dream to be an actress, but also I didn't want to let them down.”

“I definitely think religion is responsible for a lot of the evils of the world. I mean that's not really in debate. But at the same time, I think whatever gets you through the day, whatever helps you make sense of life I'm not gonna begrudge my grandmother with her rosary beads. It works for them. And at the end of the day, I don't claim to know the answer to anything.”

“I don't think the entertainment business in general will ever just be okay with how people are. I think we're in a business that critiques everything we do, and you kind of just take it with a grain of salt. I look at my grandmother, and I think she's aged beautifully, so I hope that I could be a smidgen of how she's aged. There's nothing you can do. All you can do is take of yourself and do the things that make you feel good and make you healthy and age appropriately, but there's always going to be people out there are going to say something, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

“The story of my grandmother is that of a French woman from the provinces who through her perseverance and thirst for knowledge worked her way up to become the head of a school. She belonged to a generation that didn't travel much. But she believed in Europe and she wanted Europe. And she read a lot - she knew mythology, literature and the classics very well. She passed that on to me, along with the conviction that you can earn your own position in society.”

“When I approach a more mature age, I am not going to live in America. Visiting my grandmother, when she was 94, which is a very long life in Cambodia, I saw how important it was that she was in a community with my sisters, brothers and all grandchildren were so involved in her life. I liked that experience so much more than visiting my sister-in-law's grandparents in a nursing home. It's about looking at a community through your window versus being part of a community that's alive, that is youthful and old and hungry and smelly and loud, where everything is vibrant and colorful.”

“I want to die consciously, without fear, and without anger. Three things. I see my friends dying with fear and anger and it's terrible. My grandmother kept her clothes ready for 40 years for her funeral. She lived to 103! But she kept the clothes in a cupboard. As the styles changed, she changed the clothes! I think if I start now with my funeral, it's good.”

“I don't think I'm more politically-based as much as socially-based. My grandmother died on February 29th, and she kept all of my magazine and newspaper scraps, every interview. I've been in the newspapers since I was about 15 - not for rapping, but for real substantive stuff I was doing in the community, organizing around gang violence in the schools. So I had already made my grandma proud before I was on TV. I've always been who I am.”

“I think if you were to talk to women who have run, both successfully and unsuccessfully, nearly all of them would say, "You learn so much." You learn about yourself, what you're capable of doing.... And it doesn't have to all happen when you're young - I mean, one of the most powerful women in American politics is Nancy Pelosi. She had five children. She didn't go into politics until her youngest child was in high school.... That's one of the great things about being a woman in today's world: You have a much longer potential work life than our mothers or our grandmothers did.”

“The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.”

“The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent.”

“You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

“And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we're all sweating it - when we're worried that the bill won't pass, and it seems like all is lost - Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward... with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.”

“Those market researchers... are playing games with you and me and with this entire country. Their so-called samples of opinion are no more accurate or reliable than my grandmother's big toe was when it came to predicting the weather.”