I had this extraordinary role-model of rags to riches success in my grandfather and yet I was a girl, and girls in a very military family were not meant to have professional careers. I think that created the spur and edge to drive me on.

My grandfather left Cuba when Castro came into power and literally left everything. He had two suitcases and two kids and showed up in New Jersey and waited for my uncle to meet up with him. Imagine - there were no cell phones back then!

All my life, I've wanted to write a book inspired by my relationship with my grandfather. Basically, my grandfather was a guy who everybody in the family regarded as disagreeable at best. But I loved him intensely. He was wonderful to me.

My grandparents were far more English in their manners than they were Chinese. For example, we spoke English at home, had afternoon tea every day, and my grandfather, who attended university in Scotland, would smoke his pipe after dinner.

My dad's father would take me to WWE shows when I was younger, and my other grandfather, my mom's dad, would watch wrestling with me at the house. They just really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, they both passed away before I signed with WWE.

Grandfather was an old-fashioned pharmacist who never ceased venting his resentment at the growing number of retail items the drugstore had to carry, and he would go into periods of fearful rage when the subject of chain stores was raised.

My father never really encouraged me or even took an interest after I walked away from the family business. No one did except my mother and my grandfather. To be truthful, I cannot remember one meaningful conversation I had with my father.

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?

My grandfather renounced his Italian citizenship to come to this country and many members of my family were in the military. I will honor the flag and show solidarity with the flag. What can we stand for if we are not proud of this country?

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

When I started with Ramesh Sippy's 'Buniyaad' in 1985, I was in my mid-20s and within a year, I was elevated from a lover to a father and then to a grandfather. By the time the show finished, I was portraying the role of an 80-year-old man.

My parents came from very humble families. My grandfather had a construction business coming from farmland, and my grandmother could never read or write. We were very spoiled. We had a nice house - and then, all of a sudden, we had nothing.

I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn't have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.

At one point, when I was 20 and living in Kentucky, I got shot - it was a land dispute over six inches of property that ran a hundred yards through my grandfather's land. It was really over the honor of my family and that of another family.

I'm awful at karaoke, but if I did have to sing, I'd go for my favourite Frank Sinatra song 'I've Got You Under My Skin.' The fact I love Frank is my grandfather's doing: he drummed it into me from a very early age that Frank Sinatra is God.

I created the Women's Federation for World Peace in order to restore all that woman originally lost. You American women don't need a man in the position of grandfather, parents, husband, elder or younger brother. You only need the true Adam.

I grew up with my grandfather [Elia Kazan] being famous in a way that's not like Beyoncé, but famous in a relative way. It made me feel weird about the way that we treat people that are famous, and it made me feel weird about fame in general.

My given name was Zahra, which is the 'flower of the desert.' I don't look anything like the flower of the desert. My name was changed by my grandfather to Iman, which means 'have faith.' And it meant to have faith that a daughter would come.

My grandfather, Jesse Bowman, was of Abenaki Indian descent. He could barely read and write, but I remember him as one of the kindest people I ever knew. I followed him everywhere. He showed me how to walk quietly in the woods and how to fish.

My father could be very strict, but very fair. His father was the same. We all respected my grandfather; he was the head of the clan. Every morning, we all had to say good morning and kiss his hand. But not me. I jumped on his lap and bit him.

Although both my grandfathers encountered ethnic prejudice, they viewed this as an aberration-a failure of some Americans to live up to the nation's ideals. It did not dawn on them to blame the bad behavior of some Americans on America itself.

The Rock now the hottest thing. He come from wrestling background. Father, mother, grandfather all from wrestling business: 2-3 generations. I watch his movie. He great movie star, and I be wrestling with his father Rocky Johnson. I love them.

Our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies - but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.

I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life.

I have my real name and RJ. I've gone by RJ since I was eight, but I was named Roy after my grandfather. They called me Little Roy, which sounded like Leroy with a Texas accent, but my mom didn't want to have a Leroy as a son, so it went to RJ.

My mother told me I was begging her to be an actor when I was four. My father and my grandfather saw at least one or two movies a week; they were film buffs, so I guess it just rubbed off on me. And now it's kind of become a way of life for me.

My grandfather had been on the New York City force with his 11 brothers around the turn of the century. He was killed in the line of duty. My father, who was 16, was the oldest son, so he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother.

I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.

The wedding ring on my left hand was bought by my grandfather, Samuel Miliband, in Brussels in 1920. I never knew him, as he died when I was one. But his ring was kept by my aunt until it was placed on my finger by my wife Louise 32 years later.

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.

My grandfather was born in 1920. His grandfather was born in 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War, into an America where slavery had yet to be abolished. And so, as I have sometimes thought about it, I dodged slavery by just five generations.

My grandfather played a big part in raising me, and he taught me how to be a gentleman. Since he first told me those types of things when I was 13 years old, I've taken all those types of lessons from him to heart. I'd like to keep that with me.

My mom was born in Korea - Seoul, Korea, during the '50s, '51. She was abandoned; her and my uncle were abandoned. My grandfather was a Seabee and adopted my mom and my uncle, and brought them to Compton in the '50s. That's where she was raised.

I come from a family of teasers myself. My grandfather was from Liverpool, and he had a dry sense of humor, and he would tease us terribly. My brother Beau was so skilled in his teasing that he could get a rise out of me by simply pointing at me.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.

I keep two sentimental mementos on my desk to remind me of two favorite men. There is an inkwell that my Uncle Seymour made, a brass grotesque he mounted on a marble base. And my grandfather's shaving cup is there, used to store pencils and pens.

I had a great childhood. Even though I never had my own room - I shared the porch with my grandfather and kept my belongings in one drawer of a dresser that was jammed next to the piano - I never went hungry and was always supported by my family.

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.

That is one of the first things my family, my mother and my grandfather, had taught me about acting: 'Use your eyes!' Not being able to do that physical aspect of it, and having to put it all into your voice? That was a little bit of a challenge.

My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher, and there was nothing really modern that went on under their roof. We watched television, but they were very picky about what we could watch - old Westerns and stuff that wasn't vulgar or violent at all.

It was no mystery why Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold had singled me out as a prime prospect for their heinous crime. My grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, was the chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck and Co. His prominence made me an ideal choice.

My grandfather was an amazing man. You talk about character and integrity, everyone who knew him, whether they agreed with him or not, said, 'George Romney is a good man, and he sticks to his principles: a man of honesty and hard work, integrity.'

I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.

I come from a law enforcement family. My grandfather, William J. Comey, was a police officer. Pop Comey is one of my heroes. I have a picture of him on my wall in my office at the FBI, reminding me of the legacy I've inherited and that I must honor.

I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.

Whenever I'm in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood - as do other family members.

Both me and Ishmeet were very naughty. We used to have my grandfather's swords in the house. We used to take all these swords and take all the showpieces Mom had and slice them one by one. He actually locked my nana in the kitchen once for two hours.

I had a Jewish grandfather. We managed to hide this fact from the authorities by falsifying documents, my father and I. His father was Jewish, but because my father was an illegitimate child, it was rather easy to pretend that his father was unknown.

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

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