Political Quotes

“I rise to thank my colleague from Maine, whose amazing work as chair of the Aging Committee continues to inspire me. I also rise to share a story that is very personal to me. It is a story about one of the smartest people whom I have known, my grandmother Katherine, whom I was named after. She was the daughter of an Italian immigrant and his Italian-American wife. She was exactly the kind of person you think of when you think of an Italian grandmother. If you have ever had one, you know that she loves to feed people and invite the whole family--aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone--over to her house for dinner on Sunday nights. The other 6 days of the week, she worked on volunteer projects throughout Las Vegas with her sorority, Beta Sigma Phi. She never graduated from college, but she was a leader in our community, and she was always reading. If you walked into her house, it was full of books. In fact, the first thing that you saw when you walked into her house was, on one wall, floor to ceiling, a bookcase with all of the books that she had read. She was brilliant. She was one of my greatest inspirations. Her work in our community in Las Vegas is one of the reasons that I decided to pursue a career in public service. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. At first, you could barely notice a difference. There were small things, things that could happen to anyone--lost keys, mismatched socks, books left in odd places.…”