Grandmothers Quotes

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.”
― Ellen DeGeneres

“This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.”
― Rick Bragg

“When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them.

Each funeral was a funeral for all of us.

We lived and died together.

All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground.

And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt.

And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild's ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“I still loved Granny. It flowed out of my chest. With Granny gone, where would my love go?”
― Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow

“I thought grandmothers had to like you. It’s a law or something.”
― Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox

“And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“if god had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn't have given us grandmothers.”
― Linda Henley

“We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Some moments can only be cured with a big squishy grandma hug.”
― Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One

“Granny always said finding justice was as tough as putting socks on a rooster.”
― Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow

“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.

I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God’s angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma’s rough slow hands pat my cheek or braid my hair.

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.”
― Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

“Grandmas didn't die from stuff like that. Grandmas went on and on, enduring year after year, shriveled and worn but somehow ageless.”
― Christina Henry, The Girl in Red

“Remind me why I decided to bring you with me?"
"Because your grandmother told you to," said Shen.”
― Catherine Doyle, Twin Crowns

“Anyway, thanks to Bob, that Christmas, my mother bought my grandmother and myself both vibrators. Now, as unusual as a gift like this sounds, you have to admit that they are the ideal stocking stuffers. I mean, you can fit the vibrator into the long top part of the stocking and still be able to get another cute little gift in the toe.
Well, I have to admit, I enjoyed mine but my grandmother refused to use hers. She was concerned that it would short-circuit her pacemaker. She said she'd gone this long without an orgasm, she might as well go the whole way.
And that pacemaker, by the way, was later recalled.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“On holidays, I cave in to the memory of love, and associate desserts and eating with the love I experienced at my grandmother's table. She was a great cook, and sweets crowded the side console cabinet during Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I have no answer as to how to overcome this. I will try until I die, every day. Just keep trying to be well. Enough said.”
― André Leon Talley, The Chiffon Trenches

“Despite the raised voices and the wild gesticulations, nobody here is wrong. The beauty of ragù is that it's an idea as much as it is a recipe, a slow-simmered distillation of what means and circumstances have gifted you: If Zia Peppe's ragù is made with nothing but pork scraps, that's because her neighbor raises pigs. When Maria cooks her vegetables in a mix of oil and butter, it's because her family comes from a long line of dairy farmers. When Nonna Anna slips a few laurel leaves into the pot, she plucks them from the tree outside her back door. There is no need for a decree from the Chamber of Commerce to tell these women what qualifies as the authentic ragù; what's authentic is whatever is simmering under the lid.
Eventually the women agree to disagree and the rolling boil of the debate calms to a gentle simmer. Alessandro opens a few bottles of pignoletto he's brought to make the peace. We drink and take photos and make small talk about tangential ragù issues such as the proper age of Parmesan and the troubled state of the prosciutto industry in the region.
On my way out, Anna no. 1 grabs me by the arm. She pulls me close and looks up into my eyes with an earnestness that drowns out the rest of the chatter in the room. "Forget about these arguments. Forget about the small details. Just remember that the most important ingredient for making ragù, the one thing you can never forget, is love."
Lisetta overhears from across the room and quickly adds, "And pancetta!”
― Matt Goulding, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture

“Appalachia, in fact, is a very matriarchal culture. We revere our grandmothers and mothers.”
― Anthony Harkins, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy

“In Appalachia, everyone has a fierce granny story.”
― Anthony Harkins, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy

“The lives of even quite recent generations might almost disappear from our understanding if we did not think of their aspirations.”
― Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“[S]he made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Match Girl

“Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan's. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair.”
― Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country

“Well, whatever he calls it," said Marlon's granny, "he looks like an idiot with that stupid great thing stuck in his mouth all the time.”
― Jill Murphy, The Last Noo-Noo

“I haven't seen that apron on anyone in so long; even Gran herself was too ill to use it in her final months. And to see it become three-dimensional, to see a body give it shape again... I don't know why, but it makes me look away.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“Grandmother had passed three summers ago after a stroke in her garden, and now that she was gone, Danielle had a thousand and one questions for her. The lost questions hurt the most.”
― Tananarive Due, Ghost Summer

“Thank the Lord for the prayers and provision of grandmas! I’m not sure what would have happened to Stephen and me without those two sweet saints being the constants in our lives.”
― Bart Millard, I Can Only Imagine: A Memoir

“The light between them outshines the November day. My heartstrings tug, and I want to call my mother and my grandmother, the women who built me - who implanted the idea that whatever path I chose for myself, I could conquer it.

What a gift that was. What a gift that still is.”
― Lisa Wingate, Shelterwood

“The granny roles will be easy for her because old people just get to say whatever everyone else is thinking. Like children and fools, grandmothers are not held to the same standards as the rest of society. They are given permission to wear their true feelings externally.”
― Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot