My Grandmother Quotes - Page 9

• Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Horse, Children, Block

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.16

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• Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry. . . Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.

  J. Ruth Gendler

  Summer, Daughter, School

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• I studied piano from the age of three. My grandmother taught piano. I stayed at her house during the day while my parents worked. I obviously wanted to learn to play. And so she asked if she could teach me, and my mother said don't you think she's too young. My grandmother apparently said no. So I could read music before I could read, and I really don't remember learning to read music. So for me it's like a native language. When I look at a sheet of music, it just makes sense.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Mother, Thinking, Play

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• Me being in my grandmother's yard in Brooklyn. I must have been about 3. I had this red balloon. I let go of it, and it went up into the sky and just kept going and going. I completely flipped out, because I didn't understand why.

  Lenny Kravitz

  Letting Go, Grandmother, Sky

  "Lenny Kravitz: The ‘Precious’ Interview With Kam Williams". Interview with Kam Williams, www.eurweb.com. March 18, 2010.

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• 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

  Mother, Growing Up, Domestic Violence

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• More a paraphrase than a quote, really, but it comes from a prayer which was stitched into a sampler above my grandmother's bed. It began like this: 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep...'

  Neil Peart

  Prayer, Sleep, Grandmother

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• At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.

  Jung Chang

  Grandmother, Age, Fifteen

  Jung Chang (2008). “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China”, p.1, Simon and Schuster

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• In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious.... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Writing, Grandmother, White

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2008). “Infidel”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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• We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Mother, Writing, Worry

  Interview with Nicole Sealey, mosaicmagazine.org. September 6, 2013.

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• I'm in a very close-knit, very, very tight family. My grandmother had 13 kids, so we had a lot of family like 50, 60 grandchildren and we all lived in Jersey, relatively in the same area. So every time there was something, my entire family was there. And I just believed everybody's family was like that.

  Lauryn Hill

  Kids, Grandmother, Grandchildren

  "Queen of Hip Hop". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 18, 2000.

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• I'm not really into comfort books. There are too many of those as it is. Just sort of narcotic books, like my grandmother used to read. They have value like Paxil has value, but there's plenty of them in the world already. There's a shortage of confronting, stimulating, exciting books.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Book, Grandmother, Comfort

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

  Penelope Lively

  Country, Home, Grandmother

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• My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.

  M. Night Shyamalan

  Grandmother, Years, Play

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• It's funny because the most sane women I've ever met are my mom and my grandmothers. I think you have to be incredibly sane and self-aware to function in relatively insane environments.

  Jenny Lawson

  Mom, Grandmother, Thinking

  "Sassy Bloggess Jenny Lawson Mandates Cheesecake for Everyone...and for You to Read Her (Mostly True) Memoir, Out Today". Interview with Meredith Turits, www.glamour.com. April 17, 2012.

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• I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attention, ignored. At dark, I kept reading, first on the couch, a bologna sandwich in one hand, then in my bed, by the light of a 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling on an orange drop cord. When my mother came in from her job as a maid and unplugged my chandelier, I replayed the story in my head until it was crowded out by dreams. I woke the next morning, smelling biscuits, and reached for the book again.

  Rick Bragg

  Mother, Dream, Morning

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• My grandmother, she's been the positive portion of my life the entire time. She raised us Baptist, and when I got old enough to say I didn't want to go to church, she didn't force me. She was cool.

  Curtis Jackson

  Grandmother, Church, Baptists

  "Money talks". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. September 29, 2003.

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• My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of stories and legends of the women of the schtetl.

  Marge Piercy

  Religious, Grandmother, Important

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• When I look in the mirror, I don't see my Dad, I see my grandmother. For a while it was my mother looking back at me. If only it was my Dad.

  Colin Firth

  Mother, Dad, Mirrors

  "And When Did You Last See Your Father? - Colin Firth interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• One of my most sentimental items is my grandmother's engagement ring that my mom gave me a few years ago. It's a Victorian-style setting that's closed in the back, so it doesn't sparkle the way diamonds do now. I wear it as a pendant.

  Georgina Chapman

  Mom, Grandmother, Years

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• I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I moved to LA when I was about eleven years old. I always go back to Milwaukee whenever I can. Just chill with my grandpa and my grandmother and just be with family, be with people that were there before I got a million views on YouTube because of my music video.

  Jacob Latimore

  Grandmother, Views, Years

  "Exclusive: Jacob Latimore talks Black Nativity and Maze Runner". Interview with Wilson Morales, www.blackfilm.com. November 26, 2013.

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• I'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.

  Oriana Fallaci

  Mother, Years, Giving

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• My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people.

  David Dinkins

  Mother, New York, People

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• People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.

  Adriana Trigiani

  Memories, Grandmother, People

  Adriana Trigiani (2003). “Big Stone Gap: A Novel”, p.4, Ballantine Books

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• The Wise County Bookmobile is one of the most beautiful sights in the world to me. When I see it lumbering down the mountain road like a tank . . . I flag it down like an old friend. I've waited on this corner every Friday since I can remember. The Bookmobile is just a government truck, but to me it's a glittering royal coach delivering stories and knowledge and life itself. I even love the smell of books. People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count on the Bookmobile.

  Adriana Trigiani

  Beautiful, Wise, Friday

  "Big Stone Gap". Book by Adriana Trigiani, January 1, 2003.

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• I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

  Maya Angelou

  Grandmother, Men, Years

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