My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year on Christmas.

For any of us in this room today let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in our grandmothers lived in where career choices for women were so limited.

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once and I could play it.

As a former teacher and a mother and grandmother I know firsthand the importance of a quality education.

My grandmother was a teacher my sister was a teacher my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

If a tie is like kissing your sister losing is like kissing you grandmother with her teeth out.

I don't remember ever deciding to become a performer. I just always was. I began performing by mimicking the performers on the new television that first took the attention away from me as the baby of the household. I continued performing to put a smile on my grandmother's face and always considered her when accepting or declining roles.

I always remember having a healthy respect for my grandmother.

My grandmother always told me you must keep to your old roads and stick to your original friends and just go through smooth be careful and stay positive.

A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale New York society woman best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

My grandmother and I saw an average of eight movies a week double features second run.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My identity is linked to my grandmother who's pure Filipino as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.

I hope telling stories though 'Making a Difference' - as in my academic work and nonprofit work - will help me to live my grandmother's adage of 'Life is not about what happens to you but about what you do with what happens to you.'

My grandmother always taught me 'If you don't have a home family and church you don't have anything.'

It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.