I grew up reading Tolkien, and I love him. But I love him in the way that you love that rambly old grandfather. You have to sit through some pretty off-topic stuff before he starts telling his cool old war stories.
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'
Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened.
We don't just change our minds, we change the way we see things. That's one reason I'm a better grandfather than I was a father.
My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.
That is like in my parents' generation, Walter Cronkite. If you were gonna go into broadcasting, if you weren't gonna be Walter Cronkite, you may as well not go into it. Even after I'd try and tell my parents that he was the epitome of left-wing bias. Well, my dad knew it. My grandfather wouldn't believe it.
It was not the right-wing Russians or the gun-toting settlers who carried out the Nakba. The Nakba is the legacy of Zionism's putatively socialist wing. It was the grandfathers and mothers of the "enlightened public" of today's Israel who literally drove tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinians into the sea in 1947-48 all along the Mediterranean coast, or who marched them at gunpoint to Ramallah.
I was seeing B-52s, they're old enough that your father, your grandfather could be flying them. We are not - we are not keeping up with other countries. I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike.
The common fisheries policy unfortunately led to the devastation of fishing in Scotland. My dad had to close his business. As a result something that he been built up by by grandfather and maintained by my dad disappeared. So my dad suffered.
It was all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealinggreat-great-grandfather!
There are many important elements to being a parent. A lot of people don't have fathers but they might have someone in their life who's a good male influence and support. There's no cookie-cutter way of raising children and no family is the same, but the most important thing is that children are loved, supported and cared for, whether it's coming from a relative or a friend or a grandfather or a good school teacher. Anyone. Children just need good examples and mentoring to teach them and show them how to do things.
When the music stopped, it could have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfather took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.
I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated
Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him
Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?
My grandfather would have loved to have met you," he told her huskily. "He would have called you 'She Moves Trees Out of His Path.' " She looked lost, but his da laughed. He'd known the old man, too. "He called me 'He Who Must Run into Trees,'" Charles explained, and in a spirit of honesty, a need for his mate to know who he was, he continued, "or sometimes 'Running Eagle.' " " 'Running Eagle'?" Anna puzzled it over, frowning at him. "What's wrong with that?" "Too stupid to fly," murmured his father with a little smile.
My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.
One of the stories that dominates our family literature was the fact that my maternal grandfather contracted for - I don't know under what terms - but, for a large section of the old slave plantation. He established himself - sisters and brothers, cousins, etc. on fifty- and sixty-acre plots.
My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and his life and history were very formative to myself and my family. The almost unimaginable dichotomy between the different eras of his life always crushed my brain on some level. That this guy who was shoveling carob chips out of a barrel and restocking yogurt popsicles could also have those numbers on his arm. It was an inconceivable juxtaposition. His experience was the main window for our family into any kind of social consciousness, or sense of history, or politics, even though a lot of it went unsaid.
You have to understand that I'm a child of the second generation, which means my mother was in Auschwitz, and the aunt of my mother was in Auschwitz with her; my grandmother and grandfather died there. So yes. All of those gestures they work for you, or for them, to fill their time or not feel their anxiety. But the child feels everything. It doesn't make the child secure. You put the child in a jail.
My earliest memory is having my grandfather, who was born in 1899, read the newspaper to me in a foreign language. I was utterly captivated by the fact that he took the time to read it to me. I didn't know what he saying, it was in a completely different language. I think it was in French. But I was just so honored that he was with me and talking to me. It's extraordinary that you know someone from that time, and also someone that's willing to give you the time of day, who's lived through so much.
My nation faces a fundamental challenge - survival. The regime is more threatened than ever before. My forefathers had it easy. The Great Leader, my grandfather, ruled with the support of the world's other superpower at the time, the Soviet Union, as well as our China. But today, the Soviet Union is history and China has become more integrated with the Western system. And the United States seeks regime change in my country. And yet, we have survived with our ideology and system intact. How? Because we have built a protection for ourselves in the form of nuclear weapons.
The 1970s were the height of social mobility. College was accessible. My grandfather was a poor immigrant who went to a public school in Ohio, and my father went to Harvard. That wasn't unusual. There was a feeling that anything was possible and you didn't have to be born into money to have a successful life. Now, people don't believe in the idea that anything is possible. We have more inequality than we've had ever before and a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I was five. My grandparents - my mom's parents in New York - were stage actors. I think indirectly I wanted to do it because of them. My grandfather would tell me stories about Tennessee Williams and actors he worked with in New York. He had such a respect for acting and such a love for storytelling about that world. I grew up hearing him tell tales of it.They were never encouraging me or discouraging me to take part. They were always feeding me with theater.
My grandfather had come over as a member of the czarist army, to make an arms deal with the British government. Being a blinkered military man, he was unaware that the Russian Revolution was about to take place.
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