Grandma Frida Quotes

Do you have a girlfriend?" Grandma Frida asked. I put my hand over my face. "No," Mad Rogan said. "A boyfriend?" Grandma Frida asked. "No." "What about ... " "No," Mom and I said in unison. "But you don't even know what I wanted to ask!" "No," we said again together. "Party poopers." Grandma shrugged. ~ Ilona Andrews

You have to live a little." Grandma fitted the track bar into the cog on the track. "Go out with a bad boy. Run headfirst into a fight. Get roaring drunk. Something! ~ Ilona Andrews

We don't need the money that badly," my mother said. "According to my sisters, we do." I slid the photograph with dollar signs toward her. Mom swung toward Grandma Frida. "Mom!" Grandma Frida's eyes got really big. "What? Don't look at me!" "You started this." Ha! Attack deflected and redirected. "I did no such thing. I'm innocent. You always blame me for everything." "You started it and you encouraged it. Now look, she's taking on murders because you're guilt-tripping her to put food on the table. And what kind of message does this send?" "A true-love kind of message." Grandma Frida grinned. ~ Ilona Andrews

Mom?" Mother turned to Grandmother.
"What?"
"She's going to lunch with her kidnapper!"
"Take a picture for me," Grandma said. ~ Ilona Andrews

What do you do?" Leon leaned forward. "You left the Army and disappeared. How come?"
"Leon," Mother warned.
"Is it because of the war?" Lina asked. "People on Herald say you have PTSD and you became a hermit like a monk because of it."
"Either a hermit or a monk, not both," I corrected out of habit.
"Herald also said he was disfigured." Arabella made big eyes.
"Yes, I'm a hermit. Mostly I brood," Mad Rogan said. "Also I'm very good at wallowing in self-pity. I spend my days steeped in melancholy, looking out the window. Occasionally a single tear quietly rolls down my cheek."
Arabella and Lina snickered in unison.
"Do you also brush a white orchid against your lips?" Arabella put in.
"While sad music plays in the background?" Lina grinned.
"Perhaps," Mad Rogan said.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" Grandma Frida asked.
I put my hand over my face.
"No," Mad Rogan said.
"A boyfriend?" Grandma Frida asked.
"No."
"What about . . ."
"No," Mom and I said in unison.
"But you don't even know what I wanted to ask!"
"No," we said again together.
"Party poopers. ~ Ilona Andrews

There's our homecoming picture. Last Halloween, when I dressed up as Mulan and Peter wore a dragon costume. There's a receipt from Tart and Tangy. One of his notes to me, from before. If you make Josh's dumb white-chocolate cranberry cookies and not my fruitcake ones, it's over. Pictures of us from Senior Week. Prom. Dried rose petals from my corsage. The Sixteen Candles picture.
There are some things I didn't include, like the ticket stub from our first real date, the note he wrote me that said, I like you in blue. Those things are tucked away in my hatbox. I'll never let those go.
But the really special thing I've included is my letter, the one I wrote to him so long ago, the one that brought us together. I wanted to keep it, but something felt right about Peter having it. One day all of this will be proof, proof that we were here, proof that we loved each other. It's the guarantee that no matter what happens to us in the future, this time was ours.
When he gets to that page, Peter stops. "I thought you wanted to keep this," he said.
"I wanted to, but then I felt like you should have it. Just promise you'll keep it forever."
He turns the page. It's a picture from when we took my grandma to karaoke. I sang "You're So Vain" and dedicated it to Peter. Peter got up and sang "Style" by Taylor Swift. Then he dueted "Unchained Melody" with my grandma, and after, she made us both promise to take a Korean language class at UVA. She and Peter took a ton of se ~ Jenny Han

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.
If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.
If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
And that's who forms our poetics. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

There is nothing more precious than laughter ~ Frida Kahlo

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I miss my parents. But still, my granddaughter, my daughter, my grandma, you know, so it's very important for me. You lost your parents, but a new baby comes. It's like the cycle of fashion. ~ Carine Roitfeld

You have to step on people's feet and kick them in the back of the leg," Grandma said, "then they move away from you. ~ Janet Evanovich

I always loved the look of musicians. I've always admired them because they have a look - when I was growing up, it seemed that the ones I liked didn't need to have a stylist. ~ Frida Giannini

OCD focuses on the negative. I didn't think to myself, My praying will save my grandma. Instead, I thought, If I don't pray, my grandma will die for sure. ~ J.J. Keeler

The Kite Charm

For A Life Filled with High-Flying Fun, Play with the Wonder of A Child ~ Viola Shipman

It was one thing to, she thought, to sit safely alone in the attic, reading the letters of happily married Grandma Jo and think how pleasant it would be to have someone to give her own heart to; it was quite another to be confronted with the risk of actually opening up her chest to give it. ~ Gabrielle Donnelly

I'm not a big fan of the tchotchkes. It always reminds me of a grandma's stuffy home with a million Santa dolls. ~ Jeremiah Brent

They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore ... I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris. ~ Frida Kahlo

My grandma said "if you do good, you do it to yourself", "if you do bad, you do it to yourself."
Be wise and do good. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed. ~ Richard Peck

Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition - shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor - no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! ~ Sinclair Lewis

I come from a family of scholars who got their Master's degrees. To my grandma - and to a lot of people - an education was a way of making it out of the worst parts of their life. ~ Big Sean

The oracle had a prophecy upon your birth, that one would bring the true death to all of us and the other would be our savior."

"Oh geez," I muttered. "Grandma Piperi strikes again. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

And even though I had freckles and red hair and almost killed Grandma Bramhall, I danced like I didn't. ~ Jennifer Gooch Hummer

All my girlhood I always planned to do something big ... something constructive. It's queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura ... now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung."
"But you've done lots of things, Grandma. You've baked bread ... and pieced quilts ... and taken care of your children."
Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl's hand. "Well ... well ... out of the mouths of babes. That's just it, Laura, I've only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don't they? ... But I've dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children ... and the children are carrying them out ... doing all the things I wanted to and couldn't. ~ Bess Streeter Aldrich

Who wants avocado? ~ Wendy Lustbader

To all those who care,
You can't forever.
Time steals the years,
And your reflection in the mirror.
But I can still see the story in your eyes,
And your timeless passion that's never died.
While your skin became tired,
Your heart became strong,
The present became the past,
And your memories like a song.
And though the moment at hand is all that we have,
You've taught me to live it like it is our last.
Since two words don't say 'thank you' the way they are meant to,
I'll try all my life to be something like you. ~ Crystal Woods

I hope to be acting until I'm playing the role of Grandma, and I'd like to branch out in film - producing, directing, all of it. I'll sleep when no one wants to hire me! ~ America Ferrera

You'll see a movie about someone you hate or someone you love. Will you see a movie about grandma making apple pies? No, you won't. Only if grandma has poisoned the neighbor or is suspected of poisoning the neighbor through her apple pies. ~ John McAfee

Desperate with the endless tedium, thoughts racing and roving and deepening since they could not find outlet in immediate action, she underwent a profound metamorphosis in character. It is questionable whether the painter known as Frida Kahlo would have existed were it not for that year of suffering and constraint. ~ Bertram D. Wolfe

I went to visit my grandma. I meant to stay for two days, but ended up staying two months. (So I overslept a little). ~ Jarod Kintz

Why? So you can still qualify for assistance? Your family is gaming the system?"

"No." Diana had always hated when people said this about her family. The bosses who made her dad list a payroll company as his employer, they gamed the system. The assholes who convinced her parents to take out both a second mortgage and a HELOC in 2006 gamed the system. The employers who would never give Edith enough hours for benefits gamed the system. But ask a lot of people, and they'd tell you it's people like her grandma who game the system. They'd tell you that an old woman who's worked hard every day of her life and still struggles to get by is a malignant vacuum for their personal tax dollars, and a blight on their lives as free Americans. "We're just trying to live. ~ J. Ryan Stradal

May your dreams be sweet and your nightmares be spooky-monster-scary and not grandma-died-scary. ~ Donald Glover

Martha had come up with the nickname Godbee by accident when she was younger than Lucy. Dorothy Boyle had been referred to as Grandma Boyle or Grandma B, for short, to distinguish her from Martha's other grandmother, Anne Hubbard. As a toddler, Martha couldn't pronounce Grandma B correctly, or had misheard it, and had, for as long as she could remember, called her favorite grandmother Godbee. For some reason, it had caught on. Not only with everyone in Martha's family, but with some of Godbee's friends and neighbors, too. ~ Kevin Henkes

I try to be as organic and natural as possible when it comes to make up, so I always carry around coconut oil for removing and jojoba or Argan oil as a moisturiser. ~ Frida Gustavsson

Grandma told me not to 'squirrel' you...

She and Anne saw two squirrels doing the deed, then the male squirrel ran off when it was over. I'm slightly offended she compared me to a hit-and-run rodent. I just want you to know that I want to share my branch and acorns with you, it's not just physical. ~ Robin Alexander

The one thing I could do with my eyes closed is my Grandma's schnecken. ~ Tom Douglas

The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become 'somebody,' and frankly, I don't have the least ambition to become anybody. ~ Frida Kahlo

Mankind owns its destiny, and its destiny is the earth. We are destroying it until we have no destiny. ~ Frida Kahlo

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day. ~ Grandma Moses

And life is what we make it.
Always has been, always will be. ~ Grandma Moses

Instructions for a Broken Heart
I will find a bare patch of earth, somewhere where the ruins have fallen away, somewhere where I can fit both hands, and I will dig a hole.
And into that hole, I will scream you, I will dump all the shadow places of my heart - the times you didn't call when you said you'd call, the way you only half listened to my poems, your eyes on people coming through the swinging door of the café - not on me - your ears, not really turned toward me. For all those times I started to tell you about the fight with my dad or when my grandma died, and you said something about your car, something about the math test you flunked, as an answer. I will scream into that hole the silence of dark nights after you'd kissed me, how when I asked if something was wrong - and something was obviously so very wrong - how you said "nothing," how you didn't tell me until I had to see it in the dim light of a costume barn - so much wrong. I will scream all of it.
Then I will fill it in with dark earth, leave it here in Italy, so there will be an ocean between the hole and me.
Because then I can bring home a heart full of the light patches. A heart that sees the sunset you saw that night outside of Taco Bell, the way you pointed out that it made the trees seem on fire, a heart that holds the time your little brother fell on his bike at the fairgrounds and you had pockets full of bright colored Band-Aids and you kissed the bare skin of his knees. I will take t ~ Kim Culbertson

My mother is a good Christian woman who would never refuse someone a seat at her table, but I knew this was a nightmare for her. With Lula and Grandma at the table together, it's much more likely that my father will try to stab someone with his fork. ~ Janet Evanovich

I was a child who went about in a world of colors ... My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants. ~ Frida Kahlo

I'm really good at World of Warcraft. Like, crazy good. Put me in front of a computer and it's like I enter some other universe. ~ Frida Gustavsson