Home > Topic > My grandparents
1 " It is too late for me to learn your wisdom in this matter. From the time I knew aught, I have lived with a knight and his lady whose love lit and warmed the dark hall on winter's nights. Madam, my example comes not from any book of romance. My grandparents walked and breathed; they kissed and quarreled. This I must have, and I will seek it with the point of my knife in a bad husband's heart if I can find it no other way. "
2 " The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' " Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole " soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket. "
3 " I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn't play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, " No, but he and Ken got married last week." Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check. "
4 " My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead. "
5 " Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don't give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933. "
― Rob Sheffield , Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
6 " Without the Dreamscape, we can’t sleep.My parents remind me all the time about stories their parents told them, of how things were in the Manic Age. The time before our bodies were upgraded to sync with the amazing invention called the Dreamscape. Thirty-eight years ago, people actually had to fall asleep on their own and, sometimes, they would toss and turn for hours. My grandparents said when sleep, in its mercy, did come, it often brought with it horrible images I’ve heard people used to call nightmares. "
7 " Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed—for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land. "
― Deborah L. Parker , Tools to Cultivate the Promised Land: Working Wisdom From My Grandparents' Garden
8 " When my father was 17, he went to Montreal and found these submarine sandwich shops that were really successful, and weren't in Toronto [his home town]. So he went to my grandparents and said: " Look, you have to give me the seed money to open up one of these places. We'll make a fortune. They've got lines going round the block. There's nothing like that here." And my grandfather's response was: " Look, I'm sure these sandwiches are really good, and if we scraped the money together we could make a lot of money and your mother and I would be really proud of you, but you need to find something that has *magic* in it for you." It was off of that conversation that my father went to college on a music scholarship, started a film club and became one of the most successful directors of all time. "
9 " Without a word he started stalking down the street in the opposite direction my grandparents had taken. I started after him, my steps slower.And then quite abruptly Caine whipped around and marched back toward me. Features etched with determination, he yanked me roughly to him and crushed his mouth down over mine. I made a noise of surprise in the back of my throat before my instincts took over. I couldn’t help sinking into his kiss.When he finally let me go we were both breathing hard. Caine smoothed his thumb over my cheek, his eyes still dark with passion and anger. “I could give a fuck who saw that. "
― Samantha Young , Hero (Hero, #1)
10 " The life my grandparents had was thoroughly American. They built a small ranch into a huge operation and fulfilled my great-grandparents' dreams. Theirs was... a simpler time of contentment and patriotism. "
11 " My dad was fairly well-off, so I was raised in a very comfortable environment: the very nice suburbs of Paris. It was a very idyllic life. I also spent nearly all my summers in Britain, and Christmas, too, because my grandparents lived there. "
12 " There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. In order to respond to that, he had to become a hard man, with very hard rules, very hard discipline for himself, very hard days, hard work, et cetera. "
13 " I look at my grandparents and what they dealt with in the Japanese internment in Arizona. That sense of perseverance, of making the best out of an incredibly bad situation, has always been something I drew inspiration from. I always ask myself, 'What in the world do I have to complain about?' "
14 " My childhood was great, honestly. I have all these incredible memories of my childhood. I was an only child. I always had all my cousins around. I had my grandparents around. I had my parents around. I had my uncles around - whatever. "
15 " There's a lot of wisdom that my dad and my grandparents and my uncle have been able to impart on me, and what I've treasured the most is I've seen examples in my life of people embracing their creativity, not feeling insecure about their artistic inclinations. "
16 " Two of my grandparents died in a car crash. Sucks, 'cause they would have lived to a hundred. "
17 " All of the songs my grandparents and parents listened to are called boleros - they're all love songs. They're about giving your heart to a person. It's a culture that is so romantic and passionate, and that's something that I'm very proud of. We grew up with nothing, so we just want to live a life full of love. "