Grandparent Quotes - Page 8

The scariest time of my life was when I knew my Nana was dying. It was horrible, as there's nothing I could do to stop it. I grew up living with my Mum, brother and Nana (my mum's mum), so it felt like I lost a parent rather than a grandparent. It makes you realise the fragility of life.

I have such respect for people who do non-fiction casting after settling on the grandparents we got for this. It is really hard to find people who are not fame-whores. We're lucky these people actually wanted to spend their time doing this. All of them would have much rather been cooking without the cameras, being with their families. That's why they're great characters.

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.

I'm really interested in the United States, what it means to be American - maybe because my father's an immigrant and my grandparents were immigrants, and also because I grew up so isolated from mainstream life, and it was such a total shock to leave the commune and, in a way, enter America for the first time when I was eleven - so I've always felt a little like an anthropologist - like, what is this strange place I find myself in, what are the rules here?

Younger Cuban Americans who have decided to go to the island always come back telling me "that isn't the country my grandparents have told me about."

I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.

In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.

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

My grandparents are from Mexico, so I grew up with great Mexican food.

I wanted to be an actor ever since I was five. My grandparents - my mom's parents in New York - were stage actors. I think indirectly I wanted to do it because of them. My grandfather would tell me stories about Tennessee Williams and actors he worked with in New York. He had such a respect for acting and such a love for storytelling about that world. I grew up hearing him tell tales of it.They were never encouraging me or discouraging me to take part. They were always feeding me with theater.

Oftentimes when kids are left with their grandparents they're not agile enough to keep up with all of the things that they're going through.

I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.

When I was a kid, all of the parents and grandparents came out of the Depression Era. They were all freezing bread in their freezer, they were covering their sofas with plastic, and they had plastic runners on the floor. There was a great distance between them and anything authentic.

If we're to be judged by our parents and grandparents, then we all may as well impale ourselves upon jagged bits of rock.

Two of my grandparents died in a car crash. Sucks, 'cause they would have lived to a hundred.

Being a grandparent is whole new phase in your life.

My grandfather, Harry Ferguson, was a butcher in Hill of Beath; so even though my grandparents lived in some poverty, we got loads of beef. My grandmother, Meg, was a fine Scottish cook who did slow cooking.

We'll probably live 20 more years than our grandparents did. The question is, what are you going to do with those extra 20 years?

I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.

With the '60s era and Motown, my grandparents actually introduced us to that when I was younger, so I grew up listening to the Jackson Five, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, The Supremes and Diana Ross' solo stuff. I just loved it.

I've had five grandparents who have had Alzheimer's. I've been involved in raising money for two decades, so I thought, how could I combine my work with this commitment to helping dementia? One of the myths is that it's an older person's disease. We're seeing early onset dementia among people at 45. It's the disease of everybody.

The way that I feel about my Jewish identity has been really radically changed by events in life. Like, becoming a writer is one. Having children is another. And getting older and watching, you know, my parents and grandparents get older has been another, the seasons of - being witness to the seasons of life and wanting to have some kind of infrastructure to deal with it, to cope with them. Ritual has become more important to me as I've gotten older. It's not always religious ritual, but it often borrows from Judaism.

I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents' house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey.

I've been accused of being old before my time more than once. It's true that I've always felt an affinity for, and been comfortable around, older people. I attribute this to a childhood spent around my grandparents - and even a great-grandparent or two. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything.

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.