My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children’s education.
My mum brought me up by herself, pretty much. She had me at the age of 20, and my grandmother was a single mother, too, for most of her life.
Probably about 10 years ago or so I told my grandmother that I always wanted to make a record of hymns if I could ever make a career of all of this. She kind of held me to it. She passed away in 1999. I just never forgot it.
When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush.
My grandmother was a huge influence on me and the fact that there was this very strong, rather formidable presence of women in my life has been an enormous value.
Even though Chinese society was really closed, there were two windows for me to explore the world. One was from my mother and grandmother, the unseen and invisible world. Another window was brought from my father’s side, those classic and Western books.
In Brazil, you are very close to your family; we saw our cousins every weekend, and my grandmother lived with us.
I remember growing up as a kid in Houston, playing 3-on-3 in my grandmother’s driveway. I was lucky to be the youngest of four kids, so we had each other to keep ourselves busy and out of trouble. Not all kids are that fortunate.
I got my sense of humor from my grandmother. You know, my grandmother was very funny.
My father was born in 1925. He’s pretty old. And his grandmother’s cousin, I think, is Svante Arrhenius.
I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.
My grandmother Dora taught me how to cook. She’s from a small town in West Virginia called Milton. I would pull a stool up to her kitchen counter after school. My love of food started there.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
We’ve got so many different cultural groups in my family that I’ve had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.
Diane von Furstenberg is an extraordinary woman. She’s modern. She’s a mother, a grandmother, a leader.
Growing up in New York, I loved watching my grandmother Estee put on her make-up – I always admired her sense of style.
My grandmother tended to divide life into ‘nice’ and ‘not so nice.’ Life in America, her apartment, her grandchildren: ‘nice’; life before 1915: ‘not so nice.’ That’s all I heard.
Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation’s capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
Once, when I was 5 years old, a little girl who lived next door to my grandmother dared me to put on a muumuu and run across a nearby parking lot. So I did. I threw it on, hiked it up in one hand, and ran like hell. It felt amazing to be in a dress. But suddenly my grandmother appeared, a look of horror on her face.
My mother and grandmother both had beautiful skin.
My purpose is to teach and demonstrate what is possible. To demonstrate love of God and good. Remember what my role is as a woman: to be… good. My role as a mother: to teach, support and nurture my offspring. My role as a grandmother: to remind everybody – right where you are, God is.
If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing you grandmother with her teeth out.
What I continuously remember is when I was a child in the courtyard with my grandmother and we milked the goat and we made the ricotta. The still-warm ricotta from our goat, on top of a piece of bread, and we used to sprinkle just a little bit of honey or sugar on it. That flavor, that stays in my memory.
My grandmother – my inspiration – was a single mom with nine kids, and she helped raise me.
I think fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers – we should look at what young people are saying to us.
My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn’t stay in, because he couldn’t make enough money.
My grandmother was a promoter. My father was a promoter.
My paternal grandfather, when he was in the army in World War II – he was over in the South Pacific, and he thought he was gonna die. And he wrote a letter to my grandmother and their newborn son, thinking he wasn’t gonna come home.
My grandfather was Scottish and just loved the game. My grandmother was a great golfer and a club champion. Whenever I was visiting them, I got a double barrel of golf lore. I guess it was always in my blood.
My grandmother was the type of woman who always smiled and said, ‘Treat people like you want to be treated, and life is so much easier.’ My mom is the same way.
So I started to relax and would work on my act eight hours a day, sitting at a desk writing at my grandmother’s house, and I would put on Richard Pryor Live on Long Beach and would play it like a loop and think and write.
Ask any successful person, and most will tell you that they had a person who believed in them… a teacher, a friend, a parent, a guardian, a sister, a grandmother. It only takes one person, and it doesn’t really matter who it is.
My grandmother used to get her shoes made in Paris in the ’30s, and they would be shipped to her in Singapore.
When I watched ‘Jeopardy!’ as a kid, I would primarily watch with my grandmother. She was the most beautiful person the world has ever seen. Her first language wasn’t English, so she couldn’t follow along well, but she wanted to share this experience with me since she saw it was something I really liked.
My grandmother had been a part of the civil rights movement.
I was reared in a Jehovah’s Witness household. I was taught that every man should be judged by his deeds and not his color, and I firmly stand where my grandmother left me.
I’m at a slightly higher risk for type 2 diabetes, and my grandmother had diabetes. My hemoglobin a1c, which is one of the measures, started being a little high when I was drinking a ton of that coconut water.
My grandmother passed at 104. She sang and wrote songs until she passed.
My grandmother is bilingual, but she preferred to speak Spanish at home, so she would speak to us in Spanish, and everyone responded in English, sort of like what happens on ‘Jane.’
My grandmother was very funny. It skipped a generation.
I grew up until I was seven in Jamaica with my grandmother, who I still think of as the greatest person I have known in my life.
I get my voice from my mother’s side of the family. My mother and my grandmother both had strong voices.
I can understand the value of the immigrant experience and that we have become the nation that we are because people like my grandmother were able to make a life in this country.
I had a grandmother who was blind and she taught me to understand sound as an image.
Red certainly is the family color. From my mother and my grandmother, I’ve learned a lot of little tricks – the significance of color and lipstick being one of them. I started skating when I was eight years old, and my mom did my makeup for me back then.
When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, ‘You waited for your father to die; why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?’ I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.
I hate it when something is set in 1967 and every piece of furniture was made in 1967. No! If it’s set in 1967, people have furniture given to them by their grandmother, which she bought in 1932!
Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.
My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.
The taps with the bat on the spikes are one for my grandmother, one for my grandfather, one for my little sister. Then the one on the helmet is showing faith in God that I can do it.
We need to work our level best in this legislative session to help grow Montana’s economy, so that grandchildren can stay in Montana, grandchildren can visit their grandmother and grandfather by driving across town, not flying across the country.
My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.
