"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."
Grandmother quotes
Grandmother
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Grandmother quotes (page 4 of 34)
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"My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia... It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my "maiden" name, Walker."
"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood."
"My sister played the piano. She’s two years older than me, and I always wanted to play something. So my grandmother got the guitar for me, and showed me a couple of chords to start off. And then I got me a book. Next thing you know, I was playing along with sister."
"If you want to civilize a man, begin with his grandmother."
"If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother."
"Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God." "That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically. "Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady." "She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha. "A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind."
"My grandmother was probably the first person who I thought was beautiful. She was incredibly stylish, she had big hair, big cars. I was probably 3 years old, but she was like a cartoon character. She'd swoop into our lives with presents and boxes, and she always smelled great and looked great."
"I thank God, Jesus, and my Grandmother for being able to support myself and my family."
"My grandmother was always upbeat, a naturally happy person. I think I got that from her."
"Until 45 I can play a woman in love. After 55 I can play grandmothers. But between those ten years, it is difficult for an actress."
"We have become a grandmother."
"Picture your grandmother in Hell, baking pies... without an oven."
"If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language."
"My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her."
"I grew up in the South Bronx, raised by my grandmother, who scrapped and scraped to make sure I had a roof over my head and food in my stomach. I was painfully aware of what it was like to live with limited resources and a certain level of uncertainty."
"Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs."
"I don't feel like a grandmother. I don't."
"I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother."
"My granddaddy died when I was about 6 years old, I think. And my grandmother took a job cooking in the school lunchroom. So she did great. She made $18 a week."