My mom has a tape from when I was like 2 years old talking with my grandma telling her a story that's really elaborate about werewolves and wolves.

My parents and my grandfather on my mom's side would travel the earth. They went to Australia and China and they went to probably every soccer game I ever played.

My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom Zarela Martinez was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.

Miami Beach - that's where I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me my great-grandmother - a Holocaust survivor who was my roommate - my grandparents my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house.

One of my most sentimental items is my grandmother's engagement ring that my mom gave me a few years ago. It's a Victorian-style setting that's closed in the back so it doesn't sparkle the way diamonds do now. I wear it as a pendant.

It's her first grandchild so she's really really really excited. I guess my mom is a little more stressed out than me.

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now not even my mom.

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state Illinois.

My mom Irmelin taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.

Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? The mother.

I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me.

It's the moms of this nation - single married widowed - who really hold this country together. We're the mothers we're the wives we're the grandmothers we're the big sisters we're the little sisters we're the daughters. You know it's true don't you? You're the ones who always have to do a little more.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

It is past time for women to take their rightful place side by side with men in the rooms where the fates of peoples where their children's and grandchildren's fates are decided.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.

Three of my children are medical doctors they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew but they don't know much more about soul than he did.

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people so there's no virtue in that it's the way one is raised.

I was a bartender for a long time so I know how to make drinks but I'm more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did and why I get to produce more writing than she did and why my marriage isn't in dire straits.

Marriage is this grand madness and I think if people knew that they would perhaps take it more seriously.

I'm most proud of the longevity of my marriage my kids and my grandchildren. If you don't have that you really don't have very much.

There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

I remember a specific moment watching my grandmother hang the clothes on the line and her saying to me 'you are going to have to learn to do this ' and me being in that space of awareness and knowing that my life would not be the same as my grandmother's life.

For if there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Life is one grand sweet song so start the music.