Grandfather Quotes

“The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.”
― Dave Barry

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I believe that when we come into this world, we are not promised glory, fortune, fame, a happy family or really anything at all. All we get is the journey. And in these pages, you will find mine. -Dipa to her Grandfather”
― Dipa Sanatani, The Merchant of Stories: A Creative Entrepreneur's Journey

“Oh, Caddy," said Saffron miserably.
"I know. It's awful. But I'm going. We all should."
"It will be so sad."
"You have to be sad sometimes," said Caddy. "Whatever Dad says. He may be right. Granddad probably had totally lost his marbles, but I am still sad and I'm still going to the funeral. I shall be as unhappy as I like and I shall where black.”
― Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel

“Unhand me,” Grandfather barks, “you badge-
bunny of uncivil justice.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“The trick is, don’t give in to the grief. Instead, I let myself feel it, embrace it, learn from it. In bed by 9:30, up at 7:00, breakfast, then off to school where I spend five mind-numbing hours living by the dictates of San Diego County’s Board of Education, the Western version of Mao’s Little Red Book.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“Grandparents enjoy most the company of their grandchildren. For with them, they experience the miracle of being 10 again.”
― Meeta Ahluwalia

“Look, Anna,” she says in a panic, “I’ve raised you close to center. Don’t let anyone pull you to the outer edges.”
She rushes to our front-room window. “Your
grandfather is here. No matter what he says, don’t let him draw you into his imaginary world.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“Rocketing fears for Grandfather aside, the whole music puzzle starts to make sense. “It’s more than a flash mob,” I insist. “Ask Professor Walker, this is Grandfather’s exit song. It’s like his portal of departure.” But Mom’s not listening. She’s preoccupied, apparently puzzled by Dad’s astonishment. Why isn’t anyone listening to me?”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“I don't rightly know who was my great-grandfather, much less his father. How come you know that about a horse?”
― Geraldine Brooks, Horse

“It was my grandfather sense of defiance that ensured his descendants believed in their own abilities and talents”
― Basetsana Kumalo

“I knew that I was losing him, and yet we all had the courage to draw closer, to weave tighter, even all the way into the end.

Fred worked in the study, under the glow of yellow light, like an angel-we could see him in there, through the glass doors-while the rest of us sat or lay on the patio under the sky and the stars. Sometimes Grandfather would reach down, searching for my hand, find it, and squeeze it. The last bloodline of my mother, I would think, holding his hand-my last, strongest blood-connection to her-and perhaps he was thinking the same, at those times.

Father and Omar intent upon the game. Grandfather and I intent upon eternity.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“Maria, báu vật của ông!
Tạm biệt cháu.
Hãy yêu quý bà, bố và mẹ, hãy trở thành một cô gái tuyệt vời để không xấu hổ với cái tên Đức Mẹ.
Ryuzo”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“You don’t have to sleep if you don’t want to.” - Masao”
― Hidemi Woods, An Old Tree in Kyoto: How a Japanese girl got freedom

“Grandpa was gone,
his walking stick
stood by an empty chair.”
― Meeta Ahluwalia

“You know, Marco, they can leave us, they can grow old, but it's like they're still here, running around our feet, just like when they were little tykes.”
― Zidrou, The Adoption

“Seeing him amid the yellow leaves and berry-colored hips of the spent roses, and the fading hollyhocks gone to seed along the garden wall, filled her heart.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop

“His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in.

His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun,

It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“She had a point. I mean, when did my own girlhood begin and end, exactly? I couldn't quite circle a lasso around it, but I knew, at least, when it had ended. Three years ago, when Grandfather died.”
― Park Seolyeon, A Magical Girl Retires

“When I saw her figure standing on Ulv Hunger's ship, I realized she was my first love. Oh, do not laugh! Go and ask your grandfather who was his first love, and when he answers, 'Your grandmother', ask him again. He will smile, for such is the pain of first love that it leaves no bitterness behind.”
― Erik Christian Haugaard, Hakon of Rogen's Saga

“His grandmother was chopping up the ham with a fury that implied the pig had done something to offend her. Tumble was watching them both wide eyed, her glass of tea half way to her mouth.”
― Cassie Beasley

“The grandfather was dresses in a black broadcloth suit and he wore kid congress gaiters and a black tie on a short, hard collar. He carried his black slouch hat in his hand. His white beard was cropped close and his white eyebrows overhung his eyes like mustaches. The blue eyes were sternly merry. About the whole face and figure there was a granite like dignity, so that every motion seemed an impossible thing. Once at rest, it seemed the old man would be stone, would never move again. His steps were slow and certain. Once made, no step would ever be retracted: once headed in a direction, the path would never bend nor the pace increase nor slow.”
― John Steinbeck, The Red Pony

“GRANDMOTHER AND GRANDFATHER ARE THE OLD BRIDGE TO THE NEW GENERATION”
― J. Tisa

“The Dashwoods came here from England in the 1930s and never moved."
"Then a young man from India came into their lives and lived here in the 1940s. Can you imagine what his life here might have been like? My mother tells stories of when she moved here forty years ago, and even that seems wildly brave to me sometimes. The fact that my parents chose to leave their home and come to a place where they were so different from everyone. I can't imagine leaving California ever.”
― Sonali Dev, Incense and Sensibility

“The way he learned to sing was by imitating the songbirds: their warbles and whistles, their scolds. Before his stroke he'd been able to imitate certain notes and melodies of their calls, but never whole songs.

I was sitting under the umbrella with him, in early March-March second, the day the Texas Declaration of Independence had been signed, when Grandfather began to sing. A black-and-white warbler had flown in right in front of us and was sitting on a cedar limb, singing-relieved, I think, that we weren't owls. Cedar waxwings moved through the brush behind it, pausing to wipe the bug juice from their bills by rubbing their beaks against branches (like men dabbing their mouths with napkins after getting up from the table). Towhees were hopping all around us, scratching through the cedar duff for pill bugs, pecking, pecking, pecking, and still the vireo stayed right there on that branch, turning its head sideways at us and singing, and Grandfather made one deep sound in his throat-like a stone being rolled away-and then he began to sing back to the bird, not just imitating the warbler's call, but singing a whole warbler song, making up warbler sentences, warbler declarations.

Other warblers came in from out of the brush and surrounded us, and still Grandfather kept whistling and trilling. More birds flew in. Grandfather sang to them, too. With high little sounds in his throat, he called in the mourning doves and the little Inca doves that were starting to move into this country, from the south, and whose call I liked very much, a slightly younger, faster call that seemed to complement the eternity-becking coo of the mourning dove.

Grandfather sang until dark, until the birds stopped answering his songs and instead went back into the brush to go to roost, and the fireflies began to drift out of the bushes like sparks and the coyotes began to howl and yip. Grandfather had long ago finished all the tea, sipping it between birdsongs to keep his voice fresh, and now he was tired, too tired to even fold the umbrella.
....
I was afraid that with the miracle of birdsong, it was Grandfather's last night on earth-that the stars and the birds and the forest had granted him one last gift-and so I drove slowly, wanting to remember the taste, smell, and feel of all of it it, and to never forget it. But when I stopped the truck he seemed rested, and was in a hurry to get out and go join Father, who was sitting on the porch in the dark listening to one of the spring-training baseball games on the radio.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“I had been on the doctor yo-yo for many years regarding fatigue and strange illnesses, but this was sickness on steroids! It was far worse than anything I had seen before. I knew what Dementia was and I knew the end result was not pretty. I had seen my elderly grandfather die from it, but he developed it at a far older age. From being diagnosed to death only took a few years. I started to contemplate that I may not make it to fifty years of age.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“I've held numerous roles and titles throughout my life, but there's nothing quite as fulfilling as being a Paw Paw.”
― Carlos Wallace, Life is not Complicated, You Are

“Returning the phone, she said, “You’re an artist.”
The whole train seemed to shimmer. The stars shone brighter out the window.
Ray knew Grampa and his art teacher believed in him, but nobody had ever said, “You’re an artist.” Just like that. Let alone someone his own age. Maybe Mel wasn’t easy to get to know, but she sure did have a kind heart.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids