I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.
I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.
My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher.
I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.
My grandfather used to say I don't care how you talk about me, good or bad, just don't leave me out of the conversation.
A Porsche will always look like a Porsche. My grandfather took these shapes from nature, so the head lamps of the 911 maybe look a little like the eyes of a frog, but it comes from nature, and the best shapes are from nature, so why change?
The humour of the Chinese people in inventing gunpowder and finding its best use in making firecrackers for their grandfathers' birthdays is merely symbolical of their inventiveness along merely pacific lines.
I guess my biggest influence was actually my Grandfather. He used to play old records on vinyl, and would play old jazz and soul music like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and The Rat Pack and swing music.
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.
Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.
I want to appreciate you now, and avoid the rush.
You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.
Satyagraha is the pursuit of truth. My grandfather believed that truth should be the cornerstone of everybody's life and that we must dedicate our lives to pursuing truth, to finding out the truth in our lives. And so his entire philosophy was the philosophy of life. It was not just a philosophy for conflict resolution, but something that we have to imbibe in our life and live it all the time so that we can improve and become better human beings.
When I sat there in 1971 and watched my grandfather open Walt Disney World, I was a little 11-year-old girl who worshiped the ground he walked on. You probably couldn't have found much daylight between the NRA and the Disney company.
My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. It was a sin to even pluck your eyebrows, and they thought it was a sin for me to be there looking like Jezebel.
The Alzheimer's Association is what I am passionate about. My grandfather had it. My mom has it. It's a horrible disease, and with our aging population, it's a growing problem. It's terrible to lose your brain and your power to be conscious or in the moment.
My grandfather is hard of hearing. He needs to read lips. I don't mind him reading lips, but he uses one of those yellow highlighters.
I pray I die before they day comes when I do not know if my sons are infants or grandfathers.
So what are you suggesting?" Grandfather asked. "We find a more acceptable group of people, then bring the Sacrifice to them? How do you propose we find them, a Facebook post? 'Click here to apply for eternal life'?