Family Quotes

"From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word 'cozy.' That's why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grandkids pajamas and bathrobes."

- Holly Goldberg Sloan

"Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts."

- Joan Didion

"We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did — a reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now-vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor."

- Richelle E. Goodrich

"In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere...in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything... I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything."

- Hayao Miyazaki

"It's special, grandparents and grandchildren. So much simpler. Is it always so, I wonder? I think perhaps it is. While one's child takes a part of one's heart to use and misuse as they please, a grandchild is different. Gone are the bonds of guilt and responsibility that burden the maternal relationship. The way to love is free."

- Kate Morton

"When she smiles, the lines in her face become epic narratives that trace the stories of generations that no book can replace."

- Curtis Tyrone Jones

"You make all your mistakes with your own children so by the time your grandchildren arrive, you know how to get it right. Plus, once you turn 50, you kind of stop giving a s**t what others think."

- Liz Fenton

"From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts...and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own...Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free."

- Christopher Hitchens

"A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Posterity is the patriotic name for grandchildren."

- Art Linkletter

"If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn’t have given us grandmothers."

- Linda Henley

"Every house needs a grandmother in it."

- Louisa May Alcott

"It is one of nature’s ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us."

- Igor Stravinsky

"To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age."

- Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"It’s impossible for a grandmother to understand that few people, and maybe none, will find her grandchild as endearing as she does."

- Janet Lanese

"Grandparents, like heroes, are as necessary to a child’s growth as vitamins."

- Joyce Allston

"If your baby is ‘beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time,’ you’re the grandma."

- Teresa Bloomingdale

"They say genes skip generations. Maybe that’s why grandparents find their grandchildren so likable."

- Joan McIntosh

"I don’t intentionally spoil my grandkids. It’s just that correcting them often takes more energy than I have left."

- Gene Perret

"When it seems the world can’t understand, your grandmother’s there to hold your hand."

- Joyce K. Allen Logan

"Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother."

- Pat Conroy

"If you’re lucky enough to still have grandparents, visit them, cherish them and celebrate them while you can."

- Regina Brett

"I would love to go back and travel the road not taken, if I knew at the end of it I’d find the same set of grandkids."

- Robert Brault

"There will never be a day like the day your grandchild was born."

"Grandparents are voices of the past and the door to the future. They provide us with the wisdom from a lifetime of experience that should never be undervalued."

"Blessed are those who spoil and snuggle, hug and hope, pray and pamper, for they shall be called grandparents."

"If children are the rainbow of life, then grandchildren are the pot of gold."

"Grandma serves kisses, counsel, and cookies daily."

"Unconditional positive regard is rarely given by anyone except a grandparent."

"The best place to be when you’re sad is Grandpa’s lap."