My Dead Grandfather Quotes & Sayings

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit. — Wallace Stegner

An old liar told me here
To think ahead and save my money.
I should have spent it on ribbons.
I should have learned the tune my dead grandfather played
When the daft wife heard him resounding
In the deep pine woods in early November. — Menzies McKillop

Will there be anything else? Want to know my blood type? Time of the month? Social security number?"
Thinking that over, I nodded. "And your astrological sign would be helpful."
"If you want to know any of that about me, it's time you get a hobby. Maybe start a navel fluff collection, take up extreme ironing, or dress like a pirate."
"I'd make a damn fine pirate. — Ashlan Thomas

Don't put your faith in seeing God working during a circumstance. Trust in the fact that when He is done working, you will receive the end results. — Beverly S. Harless

It's about the dream of second chances," he says finally. He hasn't raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather's words. "The narrator doesn't respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she's dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn't see right in front of her while she was alive. She's begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time."
"And does she get that chance?" she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it.
"She does. — Katja Millay

Arin, you're not listening. You're not thinking clearly."
"You're right. I haven't been thinking clearly, not for a long time. But I understand now." Arin pushed his tiles away. His winning hand scattered out of line. "You have changed, Kestrel. I don't know who you are anymore. And I don't want to. — Marie Rutkoski

On Christmas morning, Dustin knocked on my door. "Miss Winters," he said cheerfully. "Breakfast."
I didn't move. My parents were dead. My boyfriend was dead. My grandfather had a mysterious hidden room that had books about the walking dead - which is what I knew I would feel like if I attempted to stand up.
"I don't feel well," I said meekly, and rolled over. — Yvonne Woon

He laughed. "You met a boy and ate him?"
"I did not write that!"
"Yes, actually you did. I'm guessing you meant to say you met and went out to eat. — Alyssa Rose Ivy

In China, where no man gets a title until he is dead; and that is a better way, after all, than with us. When a man does something very good there, they give a title of nobility to his father, who is dead, or to his grandfather. — Swami Vivekananda

Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar's death would not bring back his father, Elk's Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, "A wrong has been righted." No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, "A people has been avenged. — Raymond E. Feist

Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela announced Tuesday he will begin writing his autobiography. He spent 25 years in prison before being elected to public office. In America, we do it the other way around. — Argus Hamilton

Where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead-weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfather? — Suzanne La Follette

The best Christmas present you can give to your dead grandfather is not showing up until Easter. And telling no one about it. Especially not yourself. — Will Advise

Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms. — Michael Chabon

The socialism I believe in isn't really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it's the way I see football and the way I see life. — Bill Shankly

No mind should submit their mind to another mind He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still
that's my motto. I won't be brainwashed. — Muriel Spark

A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don't visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, "This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic." You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt. — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Sometimes you don't know what you're writing until you've finished it. — Vu Tran

The joy of living is the heart of thanksgiving. — Lailah Gifty Akita

GLOUCESTER: I do not know that Englishman alive With whom my soul is any jot at odds, More than the infant that is born to-night: I thank my God for my humility. — William Shakespeare

1.Your grandmother/grandfather/Aunt-Suzie-whom-you-never-met-but-trust-me-she-was-nice-and-it's-a-shame is dead.
2.You're letting a girl named Katherine distract you from your studies.
3.Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that invovles baby-making parts that does not actually invovle making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face.
It never meant:
4.A girl named Katherine called while you were in the bathtub. She's sorry. She still loves you and has made a terrible mistake and is waiting for you downstairs. — John Green

Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teeth. That was the image This was left with, the one that ever since was the first to recur when he thought of his dead grandfather: shriveled apple cores on the sill of a window that looked out onto an overgrown garden. — Hansjorg Schertenleib

I didn't know my grandparents. They were - my grandfather - my maternal grandfather died when I was five. I have very little memory of him. All my other grandparents were dead by the time I was of any age to remember anything. — Robert Barry

The principal goal of education in schools is to teach students basic knowledge and kindle mindsets that know how to think better and to understand the world in which they live. — Debasish Mridha

Well, I've got three things working against me before I even
walk into the room:
1. I'm the last speaker of the day. The fans are tired and a little
burned out.
2. I'm following Michael Dorn and Marina Sirtis. They do conventions
together all the time, have a set routine that never
fails, and the fans adore them.
3. I was Wesley Crusher. — Wil Wheaton

I have defeat tattooed in my DNA. My great-uncle was shot dead. My grandfather was given the death sentence and spent five years in jail. My grandmothers suffered the humiliation of those defeated in the Civil War. My father was put in jail. My mother was politically active in the underground. It bothers me enormously to lose, I can't stand it. And I've spent many years, with some friends, devoting almost all of our political activity to thinking about how we can win. — Pablo Iglesias

It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world's chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words. — Joe Hill

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell. — Julian Clary

Mrs. Lynde says Mrs. Wrights grandfather stole a sheep but Marilla says we mustent speak ill of the dead. Why mustent we, Anne? I want to know. It's pretty safe ain't it? — L.M. Montgomery

Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead. — Fred Chappell

You surround the dead with veneration and memory, you dream of immortality, and in your myths and legends there's always someone being resurrected, conquering death. But were your esteemed late great-grandfather really to suddenly rise from the grave and order a beer, panic would ensue. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather's wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother's question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from. — Michael Chabon

Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die. — Michael Chabon

Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, "You're a failure! — Jon Ronson

a man travels back in time and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth, the universe simply carries on with the grandfather dead, the time traveler forever unborn, and it does so without a care in the world as to how that murder was possible in the first place. No one will ever be aware that history has changed, and no one will ever be aware that he was supposed to have offspring, and grand-offspring. No one, that is, except the time traveler. That person, who should now never have existed, continues to exist anyway. And again, the universe just shrugs it off, insisting - and rightly so - that it owes no one any explanation for its conduct. — Edward Aubry

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother's side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld's brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight. — Augusten Burroughs

[My grandfather] returned to what he called 'studying.' He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life's burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. — Wendell Berry

Oh God, what do we do?"
"Do?" Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized, Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn't have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn't a mere auditory hallucination. "We save her, of course. — Matthew J. Hefti

The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television. — Dick Morris

Growing up, I thought my grandfather was dead. Later, I learned he was alive, but my family pretended he didn't exist because of the terrible way he'd abused my grandmother and my mother. He did things like shave my grandmother's head and lock her in a closet. With my mother's help, my grandmother finally left him. — Deborah Pryce