Grandparent Quotes

It's often said when a baby is born so is a grandparent; well, for me it turned out that when I was born it was also the birth of a Ding Dong. ~ Lisa A. Tortorello

All of us are displaced. Few people live where their great-grandparents lived or speak the language their great-grandparents spoke. ~ Hephzibah Menuhin

I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is immensely valuable. ~ Simon Hoggart

I'm going to be your grandpa! / I have the biggest smile. / I've been waiting to meet you for such a long, long while. ~ Billy Crystal

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment. ~ Lisel Mueller

If you are close to your parents or a grandparent, you watch as they get old and you learn so much from that, and it makes you want to learn more while you have time. ~ Shooter Jennings

My parents and grandparents always made me feel fortunate. I'm in a position to help others feel the same. It's just in my heart and is something I feel very very strong about. ~ Kevin Martin

I never imagined a love so pure, nor a hate that could be so cruel. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Respect elders; protect children. This I do believe. As a young man it is sometimes, in a charitable sense, difficult to shake the sentiment that every elderly person is my grandparent, and every child is my child. ~ Criss Jami

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

I was brought up by great parents and great grandparents who told me, 'Never, ever think that you're better than anyone else or that what you do is so important that the world won't miss you once you're gone,' and I kind of translate that into the stardom thing. ~ Yolanda Adams

If your grandparents are Mexican, you can relate through the roots of the show [Top Chef], through the food, through the traditions and find yourself and get to know yourself too. ~ Ana Claudia Talancon

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. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

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

I loved my own Grandparents with all my heart. I learned important lessons from them about how to treat people, how to cook and how to work ... they showered us kids with love and left the parenting to Momma and Daddy. That's the beauty of being a grandparent - the hard work belongs to someone else. I guess I never really understood the depth of their love for me until I became a grandmother myself ... it is unlike any other relationship. ~ Paula Deen

I had a very difficult childhood. I was surrounded by people who had both parents, which made me feel different. Having a bit of a rougher existence early on, it made me appreciate the work ethic that my grandparents instilled in me. ~ George Lopez

One thing you didn't realize until you were a grandparent was that little children were a tiny glimpse of magic in a dreadfully difficult world". ~ Sally Hepworth

My Grandmother would say, 'Make sure you look good. Make sure you speak well. Make sure you remain that Southern gentleman that I've taught you to be.' ~ Jamie Foxx

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. ~ Lois Wyse

The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent. ~ Sam Levenson

I have a very broad demographic, from the 8-year-old who knows every word to 'Ice Ice Baby' and the college kid who grew up on 'Ninja Rap' to the soccer mom and grandparent. ~ Vanilla Ice

We don't want this globalised economic system which does us so much harm. Men and women have to be at the centre (of an economic system) as God wants, not money The world has become an idolator of this god called money To defend this economic culture, a throwaway culture has been installed. We throw away grandparents, and we throw away young people. We have to say no to his throwaway culture. We want a just system that helps everyone. ~ Pope Francis

How precious is the family as the privileged place for transmitting the faith! Speaking about family life, I would like to say one thing: today, as Brazil and the Church around the world celebrate this feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, Grandparents Day is also being celebrated. How important grandparents are for family life, for passing on the human and religious heritage which is so essential for each and every society! How important it is to have intergenerational exchanges and dialogues, especially within the context of the family. ~ Pope Francis

Growing up, I spent summers with my grandparents in a small seaside town in Croatia. It's the most beautiful place on the planet. I still go back every year. It reminds me of what's important in life. ~ Vanya Asher

Then my abuelita booms out words, loud and clear. She always says the words should be round as dimes and as wild as blossoms blooming. ~ Tony Johnston

Being a grandparent is whole new phase in your life. ~ Kevin Whately

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

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

I want my grandchildren to look like my grandparents. I don't want them to look like Anwar Sadat or Foo Man Chu or Whoopi Goldberg. ~ Jared Taylor

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. ~ Robertson Davies

Grandparents get older and they can't do things for themselves anymore. I'm gonna struggle with that. Because I hate depending on people to do anything for me. ~ Blake Griffin

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years. But as I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family, my aunties, grandparents, is in Africa. ~ Nipsey Hussle

True love that lasts forever ... yes, I do believe in it. My parents have been married for 40 years and my grandparents were married for 70 years. I come from a long line of true loves. ~ Zooey Deschanel

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. ~ Mike Krzyzewski

I was born to a single mom and raised by her and my grandparents. ~ Anthony Foxx

Every summer, my grandparents would rent a house on Balboa Island. They had the house next to Bob Hope's. I've been going down there all my life, to that whole area. ~ Mike Love

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. ~ Seth Rogen

Just as a father feels it is all ending and his children are off to start their own families, a new role begins. In midlife, Dad may experience his second "fatherhood" as a grandparent. ~ Alvin Francis Poussaint

Kenya is rapidly developing its industry and manufacturing, and its cultural identity as a new country. We had a humongous history pre-British, and when we were colonized and violently reshuffled, we had to decide who we were again. We couldn't rest on the stories and the cultures of our great-grandparents. ~ Wangechi Mutu

There is no time so short as the time between when your kids stop wrecking your furniture and your grandchildren start. ~ Mary Margaret McBride

Quite a few vampires, especially the elders, regarded those who creep through graveyard shadows in batwing capes and fingerless black gloves as an Edinburgh gentleman might look upon a Yankee with a single Scots grandparent who swathes himself in kilts and tartan sashes, prefaces every remark with quotes from Burns or Scott and affects a fondness for bagpipes and haggis. ~ Kim Newman

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

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. ~ Phyllis Diller

There are two types of grandmothers - the ones who feel relieved when they hear the first 'Let's go home' and the ones who feel hurt. The latter are definitely in the minority. ~ Mary Margaret McBride

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them. ~ Angela Carter

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

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked. ~ Pearl S. Buck

At their core, Tiger Eyes, Forever ... , and Sally J. Freeman are all books about teenage issues, but to an adult reader, the parents' story lines seem to almost overshadow their daughters. I'm bringing an entirely new set of experiences to these novels now, and my reward is a fresh set of story lines that i missed the first time around. I'm sure that in twenty or thirty years I'll read these books again and completely identify with all the grandparent characteristics. That's the wonderful thing about Judy Blume - you can revisit her stories at any stage in life and find a character who strikes a deep chord of recognition. I've been there, I'm in the middle of this, someday that'll be me. The same characters, yet somehow completely different. (Beth Kendrick) ~ Jennifer O'Connell

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. ~ Mila Kunis

What sorts of people dig up a black grandparent and then demand special privileges? What does it mean when these same people spew racist abuse at the rest of their ancestry? What does it signify when a society rewards them for this type of behavior? ~ Daniel Greenfield

Why had I chosen the path of the law? And why law of the kind that seemed to be connected to an unspoken family history? 'What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,' the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham wrote of the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent. The invitation from Lviv was a chance to explore those haunting gaps. ~ Philippe Sands

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before, ~ Gertrude Stein

Think about your particular assignment at this time in your life. It may be to get an education, it may be to rear children, it may be to be a grandparent, it may be to care for an relieve the suffering of someone you love, it may be to do a job in the most excellent way possible, it may be to support someone who has a difficult assignment of their own. Our assignments are varied and they change from time to time. Don't take them lightly. Give them your full heart and energy. Do them with enthusiasm. Do whatever you have to do this week with your whole heart and soul. To do less than this will leave you with an empty feeling. ~ Marjorie Pay Hinckley

One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do.' I was a little insulted by the Appa-lay-chee-a business. ~ Charles Frazier

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence. ~ Adrienne Rich

I felt like I was an outsider. I think what happened to me made me develop this street sense of watching people and working out what made them tick, wondering whether I could trust them or not. I went to a lot of schools along the coast in California, made few friends and stayed with aunts, uncles and grandparents while my folks tried to make ends meet. It was tough. We had no money. ~ Tobey Maguire

Every house needs a grandmother in it. ~ Louisa May Alcott

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. ~ Isabel Allende

From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word cozy.
That's why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grand kids pajamas and bathrobes. ~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

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. ~ Ellen Goodman

After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke. ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell

I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in these tough times. A lot of them are more active, a lot of them are still working, which was not the case when our grandparents were in their sixties. ~ Anna Quindlen

It's impossible for me to hear the words quadruple murder suicide without thinking of my grandparents. ~ Anthony Jeselnik

Kids in a home with grandparents are healthier. ~ Dan Buettner

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. ~ Jenny Lawson

Grandparents have the freedom to see their grandchildren uncritically. ~ Benjamin Spock

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. ~ Jeb Hensarling

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. ~ William Feather

Through a grandmother's voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning. ~ Margaret Mead

As a grandmother, I've learned that you can't buy love. But your grandchildren are disappointed when you don't try. ~ Mary Margaret McBride

Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum. ~ Rosanne Cash

Our attitudes toward retirement, marriage, recreation, even our feelings about death and dying may make much more of an impression than we realize. ~ Eda LeShan

Personally, I'd be really glad to have a national conversation about whether to outlaw most forms of birth control. For once, the kids and their grandparents would find themselves on the same side. ~ Gail Collins

Look, how they scold me for all my loving and tippling, now that the silvery edges shine forth from my brow! ~ Abu Yahya Al-Libi

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

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

If we want to succeed, we need to recover our grandparents' work ethic. ~ Darren Hardy

What appeals to me? There are things, points of view, uses of the language, habits of dress, ways of thought and believing that came to me from my grandparents and came to them from theirs. Things that are of good use in any situation, no matter what the future may hold. ~ Tommy Lee Jones

Obama sees the world in two ways: from the black perspective and from the white perspective. He was raised as a black man, whose culture he has self-consciously adopted. But he was reared largely by his white grandparents. He lived a kind of racially bipartisan experience, and he will be able to speak a language that resonates with both communities. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

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

I think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected. ~ Bruce Sterling

One could not live without delicacy, but when / I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking / hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob ... ~ Mona Van Duyn

Grandparents ... can give the children unity of family life and some knowledge of their own family history ... ~ Jim Conway

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. ~ Esther Rolle

Now that I've reached the age where I need my children more than they need me, I really understand how grand it is to be a grandmother. ~ Margaret Whitlam

I never really learned the value of money. My father didn't spoil me, but I think my grandparents did. ~ Britt Ekland

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one's own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one's place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless. Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone m ~ Thomas Ligotti

I love Topsail Island, which my grandparents helped settle in 1950, despite the racial tensions. I wanted to immortalize my deep connection to this special island forever. ~ Rolonda Watts

I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina. ~ Cristina Kirchner

The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already. ~ Aliki

The house had the stale smell of a grandparent. When you're a kid, the smell gives you the creeps; when you're an adult, you want to bottle it and let it out with a cup of cocoa on a bad day. ~ Harlan Coben

Still, as a kid, History Repeats Itself terrified me, mostly because I was a God-fearing child. And I mean that literally. God scared me stiff, what with the turning human beings into salt and getting them swallowed up by whales, plus the locusts and famines and, not least, making sure his own kid gets nailed to death onto wood. Every time someone would die - a cousin or grandparent or Elvis - some relative preacher would there-there it away by saying that God has a plan, and we simply have no way of knowing what that plan is. But we did know. We learned about His plan every week at Sunday school. It's called Armageddon! ~ Sarah Vowell

My father is Italian, and I never met my paternal grandparents. The family name was 'Caroselli' and it was changed in the mid '50s. I think they wanted to assimilate, which was pretty common, although I love the name 'Caroselli.' ~ Steve Carell

To become a grandparent is to enjoy one of the few pleasures in life for which the consequences have already been paid. ~ Robert Breault

I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [ ... ] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [ ... ] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton. ~ Willie Nelson

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois. ~ Tom Vilsack

Just look at my face. Its an extraordinary experience. All of my friends who are grandparents have been saying, just wait, a bit cynically, but its just extraordinary. You feel like a child again yourself. Just walking on air. ~ Blythe Danner

My grandparents are holocaust survivors so I was really aware at a young age how horrible human beings can be to one another. ~ Max Bemis