I think I must be the only grandmother in the world who was given an iPod by her grandsons. It has changed my life – I’d be lost without it.
My grandmother was a very simple woman. She didn’t want a whole lot. My grandmother wanted to go to church and Sunday school every Sunday. She wanted to be in Bible study every Wednesday. The other days, she wanted to be on a fishing creek.
I never thought my first role in a film would be a grandmother.
My grandmother was one of the most loving, caring, and supportive people I’ve ever met.
At home – where my grandmother certainly had to deal with Donald more than my grandfather did because he was at work all the time – he was incredibly disrespectful to her. He didn’t listen to her. He was a slob. He tormented – in one way or another, I think he tormented all of his siblings.
My grandmother was a Muslim. My mother is Christian. And I don’t know what I am, but I believe in God.
My mom is incredibly stylish, and she gets it from my grandmother. I feel like I can’t live up to how chic they are as women. They are great role models for aging gracefully, and that’s a thing that is very key that I try to always emulate.
I grew up with strong women around me. My grandmother came to this country not able to speak the language, on her own with seven kids. And she got through it.
I don’t think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.
Everything I am is because of my grandmother.
As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
Being a grandmother is one of the least strange things in my life. It makes more sense than a lot of things… like photo shoots!
My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia – we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America.
The inspiration to cook came from my grandmother and my father who were both wonderful home cooks. But I would say I taught myself. You travel, you discover the world, you explore books – it is these things that make a great cook.
I grew up in New York, and I’ve always been surrounded by fashion. My grandmother used to write for ‘Vogue’ in the ’50s, and my mother was a dancer and a model.
I grew up feeling ‘less than.’ I was the sad, shy child hiding in the hall closet beneath coats. I’d wait for my grandmother’s voice to call, ‘Jewell, Jewell.’ I was lost, waiting to be found. I thought being found, I’d be happier, better. All the while, I read stories. Stories with both truth and lies.
Every child growing up will look to their parents, my mother and my father. My grandmother lived with us. I picked up quite a bit of family lore and history from her, which was interesting.
My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.
I used to eat under my grandmother’s dining room table. I wouldn’t eat at the table ever until I was about 10.
My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co.
My grandmother and my upbringing filled me with the spirit of the church and the spirit of the faith brought by Africans to the new land during slavery.
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.
My grandmother took me to a lot of theater. I was exposed to performance quite a bit – everything from Broadway to off-Broadway and dance and music as well. I was very lucky that way. It was a very rich childhood.
I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.
While the world may feel entitled and have the power to pronounce an individual crazy, are there times when the innocent genius, the insightful individual or just the old grandmother may reasonably declare the world to be mad? Probably, but what hope or happiness would such an individual have?
Banging on the piano while my grandmother was watching me. I’d run up to her and ask: ‘How was that, Grandma?’ And she’d say, ‘That was beautiful, baby!’ And I’d run back to the piano and play some more. I’m sure that’s why I still play today, because I was encouraged from such a young age, 2 or 3.
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
Honestly, and seriously, I know I have to do a Telugu film. It was my grandmother’s dream to see me in a Telugu film before she died. I couldn’t fulfil her dream before she passed away, but I don’t want to let go of it, either.
My grandmother, Amalia Pia Emilia Vignola, whom I called Nonna, brought out the fairy tale in everything. She used to tuck me into bed so vigorously that I never felt anything less than comforted, and then afterwards, she would sit on a cane basket box next to my bed and read Hans Christian Andersen to me.
On my grandmother’s chicken farm, they had cows, and they had this big metal container that the cows drank out of, and we used to swim in it. And we used to get into the chicken feed bins and dive through them.
Here’s a question we all ask ourselves at least once when we’re young: Where does that starlight come from? It’s been there before I was born, and before my grandmother, and her grandmother were born. So just how far is that star from Earth?
It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it – an elderly grandmother, for instance.
My grandfather was an American Communist, and he married my grandmother, who was a Russian Communist. During the 1950s, the McCarthy era, my family was viciously persecuted.
The first thing I learned was the ‘St Louis Blues’ when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, ‘They’re all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.’
Maybe it’s because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I’m frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don’t need reassurance.
My grandmother was my inspiration. She was the person who took me to the theater and encouraged me to act, and she’s the one who always believed in me.
My mom, Irmelin, taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.
Because I never attended elementary schools of any kind, I missed most of the books that were popular with other kids my age. There was an exception, however, which was ‘Harry Potter.’ My grandmother gave me the first book when I was about 13, and I read it, then read all the rest.
I’m a grandmother, and a mighty proud one.
My mother was a very quiet woman and people say that she didn’t get much of a chance to talk because my grandmother and I talked so much.
My grandmother was a sharecropper. That wasn’t even that long ago! My grandma was a sharecropper.
I interned at NASA for five years, and I grew up in Cape Canaveral, and my grandfather was an engineer on the Mercury capsule, and my grandmother was a software engineer. I literally grew up playing on the Mercury capsule prototypes.
My grandmother was British and in the Women’s Auxiliary Royal Air Force in World War II.
My grandmother, who passed away at the beginning of November, had a core adage in her life that ‘life is not about what happens to you but about what you do with what happens to you.’ She recently had been cajoling me and challenging me to do more with my life. To lead more of a purposefully public life.
I was really surprised when I was told that my grandmother did not come to see me till a month after my birth. I was born seven years after my only sister Chandranshu, and my birth was a big disappointment for her.
A lot of my family on both sides have worked in education and nursing, and my grandmother was a nurse; my sister is a nurse, and her – my other sister’s daughter is going into nursing. There’s a lot of that in the family.
My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being.
George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.
I would give anything to sit down with my maternal grandmother and have a cup of tea and play Scrabble. She died 10 years ago.
