Grandparent Quotes & Sayings

We rarely know who our ancestors were. Who can even remember the names of their great-grandparents? They have vanished into the dim and distant past — Dmitri Volkogonov

Forever. To create a family with a spouse is one of the most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) society. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother's family in Minnesota and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly in their positions over the years. First you are a child, then you are a teenager, then you are a young married person, then you are a parent, then you are retired, then you are a grandparent - at every stage you know who you are, you know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. You sit with the other children, or teenagers, or young parents, or retirees. Until at last you are sitting with the ninety-year-olds in the shade, watching over your progeny with satisfaction. — Elizabeth Gilbert

You don't have to be in "Who's Who" to know what's what. — Sam Levenson

When a child is born, so are grandmothers. — Judith Ellen Levy

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

The people that does not care for its children or grandparents is a people that has not future. Because it doesn't have the strength or the memory to go forward ... — Pope Francis

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

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

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

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. — Nikki Sanderson

I like my films to influence the audience. Even if it means tripping their aged grandparents with a cane when they get home. — W.C. Fields

If there's a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that's struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent. — Barack Obama

It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she'd scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.

He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn't. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.

She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.

At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. 'You're my girl,' he said.

And Lena knew she was. — Ann Brashares

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

Besides, what's in a name? Actually, a lot. Whether taken from a parent or grandparent, some saint, or even the late great Elvis, your name insists another person's dream of what you should have been. The portrait of some ancestral ideal lingers through heirloom names. Gender specific names imply all sorts of expectations. More than just a signifier used to summon, instruct, address, accuse, sometimes praise us, our names define and thereby limit us. They put us in a cage. — Brien Piechos

I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

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

I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated. — Alice Walker

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

People should never be afraid that Foo Fighters are ever going to break up, it's like your grandparents getting divorced - it's not gonna happen. — Dave Grohl

One thing is funny because my grandparents are going to come see the show and my mom was concerned that they wouldn't understand, because so much of it is Internet-based. Our generation specifically really relates to it, because we were the first people to discover the Internet and most of us can maybe navigate the Internet better than our parents can. All this information you could ever possibly know is right at our fingertips, not to mention the fact you can meet anyone! — Sarah Steele

Good old grandsire ... we shall be joyful of thy company. — William Shakespeare

One becomes a grandfather and one sees the world a little differently. Certainly the world becomes a more vulnerable place when one has a grandchild, or now I have two. And I think that possibly there's some tenderness that came out of just time and age and being a parent and grandparent. — C. K. Williams

Our parents, worse than our grandparents, gave birth to us who are worse than they, and we shall in our turn bear offspring still more evil. — Horace

Our land is everything to us ... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it - with their lives. — John Wooden

A child who has a grandparent has a softened view of life, the feeling that there is more to life than what we see, more than getting and gaining, winning and losing. — Lois Wyse

What a mystery blood was
how did a tiny gesture, a tome of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought the ehoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments. the shadow of a face looking back through the years
that vanished again into the face that was now. — Diana Gabaldon

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

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

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

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 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

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

For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. — Jhumpa Lahiri

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. — Jon Meacham

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

Once while vacationing at my grandparent's house in Rajasthan, we were sleeping on the roof and I spotted an object hovering around in the sky - kind of a UFO. It totally spooked me out. I couldn't sleep for days after that. — Nimrat Kaur

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

We can observe the Fourth Commandment by loving visits to our aging grandparents — Pope Francis

Anyone who has not known that inestimable privilege can possibly realize what good fortune it is to grow up in a home where there are grandparents. — Suzanne La Follette

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

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Childhood was fairly solitary. I grew up in a very small town called Navan in County Meath. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant and I was left in the care of my mother and my grandparents. — Pierce Brosnan

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

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

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. — Jonathan Meades

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

The train swung around the curve, the engine puffing with short, heavy blasts, and they passed smoothly from sight that way, with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is taken in theft or evasion with only that frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats him in a fair contest, and withal a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolk's vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children, which I had forgotten. — William Faulkner

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us. — Gore Vidal

I am the age of the some of the grandparents that are bringing their young grandchildren to hear the music. I have been fortunate enough to see multiple generations of families come see my shows. — Sam Bush

So many things we love are you! — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Soup simmering, music of idle gossip, yammering kids, domestic chaos - long adjusted to this rolling scene, you show them your lofty calm. — Gottfried Keller

Children exist in the world as well as in the family. From the moment they are born, they depend on a host of other 'grown-ups - grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold others who touch their lives directly and indirectly. — Hillary Clinton

Because my great-grandparents were enslaved people, the legacy of slavery was something that didn't seem impersonal or disconnected. That's what motivated me to get into law. — Bryan Stevenson

So now I'm rollin' down Rodeo wit a shotgun, These people ain't seen a brown skin man, Since their grandparents bought one — Zack De La Rocha

Communism destroyed so many generations. I look at my grandparents and their generation, and it's as if their lives were taken from them. It's really sad and frightening that something like that could have happened. But I don't really think of myself as Russian anymore. I didn't even live there for that long. — Anton Yelchin

That's the privilege of being a grandparent - they can indulge the children while parents have to be the bad guy. Grandparents can also be subversive and naughty with them. — Toby Stephens

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it. — Gus Van Sant

It's one of the best programs I've ever seen because it benefits both sides: children, who need love, and grandparents, elderly people, who need to feel wanted. — Nancy Reagan

I loved Grandpa Reed. Without a doubt, he was my favorite grandparent. — Kimberly Willis Holt

A Grandmother is a safe haven. — Suzette Haden Elgin

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

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

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

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

However, as a parent, as a grandparent, as a former educator, I know that these practices alone when we are dealing with young children are insufficient. We will never control this rising epidemic without greater accountability from the food industry. — Bob Filner

Becoming more flexible, open-minded, having a capacity to deal with change is a good thing. But it is far from the whole story. Grandparents, in the absence of the social institutions that once demanded civilized behavior, have their work cut out for them. Our grandchildren are hungry for our love and approval, but also for standards being set. — Eda LeShan

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

I once walked in on my grandparents making love ... And that's why I don't eat raisins. — Zach Galifianakis

Dear Grandmamma, with what we give. We humbly pray that you may live. For many, many happy years: Although you bore us all to tears. — Hilaire Belloc

We are not primitive. We live differently to you, but we do not live exactly like our grandparents did, nor do you. Were your ancestors 'primitive'? I don't think so. We respect our ancestors. We love our children. This is the same for all people. — Roy Sesana

I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that. — Douglas Booth

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

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. — Susan Sontag

Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised. — Joyce Carol Oates

I was born in Georgia. That's where my grandparents-and all my people-are from. But my family traveled a great deal because my dad was in the army as a helicopter pilot. — Michael Stipe

If you want to know where I come by the passionate commitment I have to bringing people together without regard to race, it all started with my grandfather. — William J. Clinton

If it hadn't been for Grandma, we'd have had no ethnic tone at all. — Edith Konecky

Nothing ensures the success of the child more in the society than being read to from infancy to young adulthood. Reading books to and with children is the single most important thing a parent, grandparent, or significant adult can do. — Anita Silvey

We haven't ever known our past. Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents. — Sam Wineburg

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

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

My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Five truly effective prescriptions to remedy a bad day.
(You can't overdose.)
- Pray; discuss your troubles with God.
- List your blessings. (The blue sky, soft cookies, warm socks, etc.)
- Call your mom.
- Visit an animal shelter and hug a lonely cat.
- Visit a nursing home and hug a lonely grandparent. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Unfortunately I don't have my grandparents, but Mum and I are working quite well together. That's candid, that's frank. Your grandmother is never going to lie to you. — Rose Leslie

Grandma told me all about it, Told me so I couldn't doubt it, How she danced, my grandma danced; long ago ... — Mary Mapes Dodge

Our family's special holiday tradition is going over to my grandparent's house on Christmas morning. My grandma cooks a big breakfast, and I love hearing her tell old funny stories. — Caroline Sunshine

What kind of vision are you casting for the people around you? Dad, what kind of vision are you casting for your children? Mom, what kind of vision are you casting for your husband? Grandparent, what about those grandkids? Leader, what kind of personal visions are you casting for the people who have invested their time and talents in your vision? — Andy Stanley

Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker's relationship. If our caretaker took their significant other back multiple times, made excuses for their actions, helped them battle demons, turned a blind eye to their infidelity, or moved from one relationship to the next, that is what we know. Their behavior becomes our very own model of what a relationship is supposed to look like and determines what we will expect from our own partners. — Kristen Crockett

It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more. — Horace Mann

Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts. — Tom Paulin

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

One of the joys of being a grandparent is giving your grandchild caffeinated sugary drinks late in the day, and sending them home. Do you have any idea how many years I had to wait for that? — Neil Leckman

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

My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me. — Forest Whitaker

People who are interested with me have for sure gotten older over the years, for example, grandparents are coming up to me telling me they grew up watching me. — Andre Agassi

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

How do you know someone is a grandparent? They've got milk stains on every shirt from burping babies. Their pants are worn out at the knees from crawling around giving pony rides. They have 2,842 pictures of the grandkids on their smart phone and not one photo of their spouse. — Regina Brett

As we've discovered, we're wired for story and in the absence of data we will rely on confabulations and conspiracies. When our children sense something is wrong - maybe a sick grandparent or a financial worry - or when they know something is wrong - an argument or a work crisis - they quickly jump to filling in the missing pieces of the story. And because our well-being is directly tied to their sense of safety, fear sets in and often dictates the story. It's important that we give them as much information as is appropriate for their developmental and emotional capacity, and that we provide a safe place for them to ask questions. Emotions are contagious and when we're stressed or anxious or afraid our children can be quickly engulfed in the same emotions. More information means less fear-based story-making. — Brene Brown