Quotessence
Home / Topics / Grandparents Quotes

Grandparents Quotes

Browse 47 quotes about Grandparents.

Grandparents Quotes

“The only reason that some people aren’t ashamed of their parents and/or siblings is because they know that we know that they did not choose them.”

“[S]he made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.”

“To the loyal and to the blood-lovers, in the good families and in the fiery dynasties, life is family and family is life. It is the same people who give advice and their vices to live well who turn out to be the ones who give resource and reason to live long.”

“Blessed is that family where there are old people, says an ancient proverb, and happy the children who heed the counsel of the old, for it's as if they had already enjoyed a long life. Love your grandparents, children, for they love you as the sons and daughters of their sons and daughters, and hence with a double tenderness. If you see they love your company, don't leave them alone, and when it's their birthday, never forget to with them many happy returns, 'A hundred more happy returns, Granny and Granddad!”

“This is a wonderful read-together book that might encourage little ones to wash up, and settle down for a cozy bedtime story with their loved ones and caregivers. Beautifully written in rhyme, with bright and vibrant cartoon-like illustrations, this book will become a bedtime favorite for children and adults alike.”

“Grandfather died a few days after his hundredth birthday. Both Father and I were there at the end, in the room where I'd been born, forty-four years ago. It was not unlike that day, with sunlight streaming through the windows, and hummingbirds hovering outside, iridescent sun-glittering flashes of jewels. A dove was calling, back in the cool shade. Grandfather's hand was cool, as cool as the river. He tried to sit up to look out at the sunlight. "Sycamores grow by running water," he sang, "cottonwoods by still water," and then he died, and I felt a century slip away.”

“Did he know he was going to die?" I asked, and Grandfather looked at me in surprise-his little granddaughter again. "He was eight-seven," he said in his stroke language. Grandfather studied my face carefully then, missing nothing. He watched my face the way he would have watched the cedars for a songbird he was trying to lure in with his screech owl calls. I was the young woman who would be burying him. He was trying to have it both-the afterlife and the here. His face was as curious as a young boy's.”

“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”

“The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland. The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox. The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides. The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun. The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus. The moral of the story? Kids are smart.”

“A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel. I walked up the silent road, wondering if I couldn’t reconcile myself again to the idea of the Sabbath, to the day of dreary silence and mutton broth I’d known as a child, if we couldn’t close the shops and still the traffic and institute a modern, churchless day of contemplation and rest; and if it would help at all.”

“We all have someone in our lives that has disappointed us a time or two, someone that no matter what they do you still try to love them through it" I just stare down at our joint hands. "The boys' dad, our son Benjamin he…" she squeezes my hand "he loves the boys in his own way" I look up into her face, but she's looking past me at Ry and Jase. "It was hard to watch those two grow up without either of their parents around for them and we tried to make up for it. To be what they needed, but every time we taught them new things or helped them with their homework or even attended their sporting events; every single time I saw the boys faces fall in disappointment. I felt that I felt disappointed towards my Benjamin." I tighten my grip on her hand, knowing it must not be easy to admit out loud. "We all have a weak spot; their dad was ours. Until he wasn't until he couldn't be anymore.”

“Through the various branches of your tree, you are connected to the entirety of human history. When we talk about the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, we're not talking about a bunch of exotic strangers, we're talking about our great-great-many-times-great grandparents!”

“They're old letters from this fellow Chubb and I used to know," he sang, almost in a whisper, and I imagined that the birds, if they could hear him, rustled in their sleep, on their roosts: his words entering their dreams, calling to them.”

“Before the ubiquity of the traditional schooling system, it was the families that fulfilled this role. The nuclear family and single parents that stay in smaller households was the exception rather than the norm. Family members tended to stay together in one area. This meant in one homestead there were grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts and so on. This in turn created a strong supportive environment”

“Small animals are a great problem. I wish God had never created small animals, or else that He had made them so they could talk, or else that He'd given them better faces. Space. Take moths. They fly at the lamp and burn themsleves, and then they fly right back again. It can't be instinct, because it isn't the way it works. They just don't understand, so they go right on doing it. Then they lie on their backs and all their legs quiver, and then they're dead. Did you get all that? Does it sound good?" "Very good," Grandmother said. Sophia stood up and shouted, "Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won't let you help! Did you write that?”

“Your father has a fondness for orchids." Could she know my father's affinity for orchids is in direct correlation with his affinity for my mother? "Much too finicky for me. I prefer azaleas. When I was a little girl, I used to drink the nectar from the flowers." I brighten a little. "I did that, too." Mom had azalea plants all over our property. She taught me how to pull the blossom from the stem and slurp from the tip of the flower like her mother had shown her. I always thought it was something unique to us, to our family. But maybe it was more. A connection to Japan, an invisible tether. "Is there a variety you prefer? I quite enjoy the omurasaki." I've caught her attention. "It is a lovely bloom," she says.”

“Do you know the Ten Commandments?" Grandma Trudie asked me. I nodded my head. Of course I knew the commandments God gave the Israelites at Sinai. I knew them by heart and in order. "What is commandment number six?" "Thou shalt not kill," I answered proudly. "Very good," Grandma Trudie said. "Then you will understand when I say that six million Jews were killed because the Nazis believed in their leader, Adolf Hitler, before anything else. When a human being is given the power to decide what is good and what is evil, the world is in chaos—crazy. Hitler said that certain people were not worthy of life, and his followers obeyed his orders without question. The Nazis showed us what kind of world we have when the Ten Commandments, God's laws, are disregarded.”

“The strength of human instinct seems to be quite overrated as it is so feeble it requires a lifetime of guidance, education, training and practical experience to develop. More critically, without conscious and diligent effort across one generation to pass its knowledge on to the next generation, all that was gained will be lost, forewarned by an increasing rarity of the reminiscence, “Every secret of life I know, I learned at my grandfather’s knee.”

“No one 'just adopts'.”

“Your grandmother and I (and many others) would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period, to have done whatever it was we should have been doing. And our lives had not prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focussed and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noted. We were spoiled, I think I am trying to say. As were those on the other side: willing to tear it all down because they had been so thoroughly nourished by the vacuous plenty in which we all lived, a bountiful condition that allowed people to thrive and opine and swagger around like kings and queens while remaining ignorant of their own history. What would you have had me do? What would you have done?”