Papa Legba Quotes

But one thing I learned from the Saints,
when the crossroads are open to you, you must decide a path.
I will not stand still while the world makes my choices. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo

I tear my heart open, I sew myself shut
My weakness is that I care too much
And my scars remind me that the past is real
I tear my heart open just to feel ~ Papa Roach

You see, Julian, it always takes courage to be kind. But in those days, when such kindness could cost you everything - your freedom, your life - Kindness becomes a miracle. It becomes that light in the darkness that Papa talked about, the very essence of our humanity. It is hope. ~ R.J. Palacio

My daddy, or papa as Ilike to call him is always healthy. Sure, he had the herpes but he managed it very well! ~ Santino Marella

Papa loves you with a dying and infernal love," the youngest girl said.
"Undying," the eldest girl corrected. "And eternal. ~ Martine Leavitt

Oh no, Papa, Kitty objected warmly. Varenka adores her. And besides, she does so much good! Ask anyone you like! Everybody knows her and Aline Stah. Perhaps, he said, pressing her arm with his elbow. But it is better to do good so that, ask whom you will, no one knows anything about it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

To this day I cannot see a bright daffodil, a proud gladiola, or a smooth eggplant without thinking of Papa. Like his plants and trees, I grew up as a part of his garden. ~ Leo Buscaglia

Sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get achance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never see papa when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway. ~ Mark Twain

No wonder Mama went away in her head when Clover passed on. And then Papa. I am going to visit my Mama tomorrow and tell her I am sorry for everything I ever did that caused her sorrow or worry, and for ever wishing, during those days, that she would come back. She probably wanted to stay there. It's a wonder she came back at all. If I knew how to make myself go away in my head, I declare I would. ~ Nancy E. Turner

Several times that day, the name or thought of Papa had come up. And each time, Francie had felt a flash of tenderness instead of the old stab of pain. "Am I forgetting him?" she thought. "In time to come, will it be hard to remember anything about him? I guess it's like Granma Mary Rommely says: 'With time, passes all.' The first year was hard because we could say last 'lection he voted. Last Thanksgiving he ate with us. But next year it will be two years ago that he ... and as time passes it will be harder and harder to remember and keep track. ~ Betty Smith

Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him. ~ Willa Cather

This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art. How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway. How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that book?
After an arrest, an execution? Of course he or she may find it in the power of the hushed chorus of other readers, but she can also find it in the writer's courage in having stepped forward, in having written, or rewritten, in the fi rst place. Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. Th is is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. Coming from where I come from, with the history I have - having spent the first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships of Papa Doc and his son, JeanClaude - this is what I've always seen as the unifying principle among all writers.
This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her lif ~ Edwidge Danticat

Papa is restless in the Field. He cannot find the rhythm. He doesn't know the step. His eye upon the horizon; his mind is in the world. His heart has left us already. His feet will follow. ~ Kristen Heitzmann

Every morning Papa brought in another pile of firewood and vines from the apple tree. Mama said they should keep busy knitting Papa's Christmas presents. Josie finished Papa's scarf and made one for Mama too. Katrina worked on Mama's pincushion, but she just couldn't concentrate on knitting Papa's socks while he sawed and hacked away at the apple tree. She had ripped out the heel and started over so many times that she had all but ruined the yarn from Mrs. Wooly.
"Well, I'll miss the old apple tree," said Mama, "but it will keep us warm this long winter."
"Yes, I'm thankful for the firewood," said Papa.
How could he be thankful, thought Katrina. Didn't he know that he was chopping up her studio? Didn't he know he was ruining her drawing board? Didn't he know she couldn't draw unless she were in the apple tree? ~ Trinka Hakes Noble

She had prayed for someone else, anyone else but Den. She'd been hoping for a nice, quiet man like Papa. Instead, the gods had sent her the man who'd scorched the world. ~ C.L. Wilson

In the rush of complex modern living, we have a tendency to laugh at the 'bring-Papa-his-pipe-and-slippers' approach to marriage - but most men are more than a little wistful at its demise. A man dreams of home as a haven and his wife as a romantic, fragrant creature whose most important goal in life is making him comfortable. ~ Arlene Dahl

I was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1917, May the 28th. So you can figure that out; that's a long ways off. Oh, I've been around a long time. ~ Papa John Creach

Lastly, the Hubermanns. Hans. Papa. He was tall in the bed and I could see the silver through his eyelids. His soul sat up. It met me. Those kind of souls always do--the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, "I know who you are and I am ready. Not that i want to go, of course, but I will come." Those souls are always light becausre more of them have been put out............ Lisel. His soul whispered it as I carried him. ~ Marcus Zusak

A white linen tablecloth
edged with pink roses --
Mama's favorite pattern --
flowed like a bride's train
from sidewalk to curb to gutter.
Papa stared at black boot marks
crossing it like sins. ~ Paul B. Janeczko

The light was leaving in the west it was blue The children's laughter sang and skipping just like the stones they threw the voices echoed across the way its getting late It was just another night with the sun set and the moon rise not so far behind to give us just enough light to lay down underneath the stars listen to papas translations of the stories across the sky we drew our own constellations ~ Jack Johnson

Where is your maman?
I don't know.
I think we've gone and lost her, Pea. Papa's voice dissolves into the colours behind my eyes.
I'm sorry Papa. I don't know how to find her, I say. ~ Claire King

God help me if I ever injure my back," Clayton quipped.
"God help you if you ever turn it," Whitney snapped, "for there'll surely be some heartbroken papa or cuckolded husband ready with a knife
if I don't murder you first. ~ Judith McNaught

Elizabeth laughed and pushed her father's shoulder. "Go, Papa, and be kind to him. I love him so. And it would be to your advantage to be on his good side."
Mr. Bennet raised his eyebrows. "Oh, and why is that?"
Because I have seen both his libraries in London and at Pemberley, Papa."
Interested and amused, Mr. Bennet said, "Ahh, and are they very grand, Lizzy?"
A more exquisite sight you will not see," she assured him. ~ KaraLynne Mackrory

Grey wasn't quite drunk, but he was far from sober when Rose entered his study later that evening. His heart stuttered at the sight of her, but his head…his head couldn't take any more.
"I've been drinking," he warned her, just in case his sprawled posture and missing cravat wasn't enough indication. "And I refuse to dance this ridiculous dance with you any more tonight."
"May I have a drink with you?"
He glanced up. She stood beside the sofa where he half sat, half lay. She looked like someone who'd just lost her best friend or puppy or something equally as tragic.
He sat up. "Of course." Never mind that it wasn't proper. Who the hell cared? They were well past proper. He was simply trying to hold on to sane.
She poured herself a substantial glass of sherry and took a seat on the chair nearest him. He sat quietly, nursing the remainder of whiskey in his glass while she took several sips from her own.
"Do you remember my come-out ball?" she asked after a few minutes.
"Of course." And he did. "I remember telling you that you looked lovely in pink."
She smiled. "You danced the first dance with me so I wouldn't have to dance with Papa."
"You were afraid the other girls would laugh at you if you danced with your father."
"They didn't laugh at me for dancing with you."
"No." He chuckled at took a drink. "I wager they didn't."
Rose sighed. "They thought you were so scandalous, you know. All night I had girls coming up to m ~ Kathryn Smith

Papa," she said easily, happily, walking across the park with him to
the Albert Hall. "What is it like to be in love?"
"Oh, it's marvellous," he said. "Or terrible. Or both. The Romans
saw it as a fit of madness that you wouldn't wish on anybody. But
there's nothing you can do about it, that's the main thing. ~ Louisa Young

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE
-by Rochelle Distelheim
To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife
who washes the socks and the children,
and returns phone calls and library books and types.
In other words, the reason there are so many more
Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.
It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.
And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.
Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater
matinees--on Saturdays?
Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,
chicken pox or chipped teeth?
Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender
his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.
Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.
And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three
for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.
I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,
and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler
On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.
Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,
tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,
and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse
unless she also helps with the laundry.
-Rochelle Distelheim
=============================== ~ Rochelle Distelheim

Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again. ~ Katherine Dunn

Papa! You painted my nose!"
"I certainly did," her father said.
"But why?" Belle tried to see the purple dot on her face.
Maurice grinned. "Because that mark makes you even more beautiful. Different and special from the inside out, just like your fantastic doll. And just like your mother, who you look and act more like every day."
Belle eyed her father suspiciously. "A purple mark does all that?"
"Yes. Because it's yours and only yours," Maurice said. ~ Walt Disney Company

It wasn't enough to push open the doors. You had to change minds. How could girls truly make their mark if their role models were houseplants, if their fashions scarcely allowed them to breathe? If any expression of opinion on any subject was considered by young men to be a threat? And even more so, how could they escape the basic fact that no matter how horrid the boys were, the young women still wanted to please them - because what choice had they, really? Where could they go besides back to their own homes, where they would rest under the heavy thumbs of their own mothers, or into the home of a man - with the hopes that this man would be indulgent, like Papa, and not oppressive or cruel, like so many others? ~ Elizabeth Letts

A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity.

In Zachariah, she sees infinity.

Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale.

There is a template for all things. ~ Emma Richler

Nonna tucked each of her hands into the opposite sleeve, a wizened Confucius in a leopard bathrobe. "Michelangleo, he goes. For days and days he stays away from Elisabetta. The other girls, the prettier girls, have hope again. And then, there he goes once more, carrying only his nonno's ugly old glass-his telescope-and a bag of figs. These he lays at her feet.
"'I see you,' he tells her. 'Every day for months, I watch. I see you. Where you sit, the sea is calm and dolphins swim near you. I see your mended net looks like a lady's lace. I see you dance in the rain before you run home. I see the jewel mosaic you leave to be scattered and remade again and again, piu bella than gold and pearls. You are piu bella than any other, queen of the sea.
"'You do not need silk or pearls. I see that. But they are yours if you wish. I am yours if you wish.If you like what you see.' He gives her the glass. She takes it. Then she asks, 'What about the figs? My bisnonno, he laughs. 'It might take time, your looking to see if you like me. I bring lunch.'" Nonna slapped her knee again, clearly delighted with little Michelangelo's humor. "There is the love story. You like it?"
I swallowed another yawn. "Si, Nonna.It's a good story." I couldn't resist. "But...a talking seagull? A dolphin guide? That kinda stretches the truth, dontcha think?"
Nonna shrugged. "All truth, not all truth, does it matter? My nonno Guillermo came to Michelangelo and Elisabetta, then my papa Euplio to h ~ Melissa Jensen

My father was quite conscious of that distinction, too, and because he spoke very freely in private, he used to sometimes say, quite fiercely, "Now that's secret!" And then if I or somebody else looked hurt because they thought, "Well, of course I'm not going to leave the table and pick up the telephone and ring the papers." If Papa saw that we were wounded, he would say, "It isn't that I don't trust you, but I'm labeling it, I'm labeling it." That phrase passed into family history. "I'm labeling it!" Papa would say, quite merrily sometimes. ~ Mary Soames

One's own family and situation are all one knows as a child. Therefore they are, by default, normal. I thought everyone had a papa who sometimes stayed awake all night writing philosophical papers, only to burn them all in a rage in the morning. It was only when I was old enough to notice that other fathers didn't act like my own that I realized the truth. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

CORY: The whole time I was growing up...living in his house...Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. It weighed on you and sunk into your flesh. It would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn't tell which one was you anymore. That shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl in. Trying to live through you. Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring back at me...hiding under the bed...in the closet. I'm just saying I've got to find a way to get rid of that shadow, Mama. ~ August Wilson

What does my soul need, Papa?

What every soul needs. Right relationship with God. ... Seek Him and His righteousness, my darling daughter, instead of pursuing your own wants. He will fulfill you in ways no human relationship could. When you put Him first in your life, before beaus and jobs and motherhood, then all else can fall into place. And only then will you be at peace with yourself and with others. ~ Kim Vogel Sawyer

People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her. ~ Marlon James

I told Mama and Savannah about Ruben's proposal. That got us to talking about marriage and we laughed and cried some, and missed Papa, and it felt good to belong to each other. I don't feel as lonely today as I have in months. At least I know there are other women around me. ~ Nancy E. Turner

Only just now she said to me, 'I am very happy, papa!' When they say 'father' stiffly, it sends a chill through me; but when they call me 'papa,' it brings all the old memories back. I feel most their father then; I even believe that they belong to me, and to no one else. ~ Honore De Balzac

We never begin worship. We aim it. ~ Matt Papa

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago. ~ Bobbi Brown

As the children were sitting there eating pears, a girl came walking along the road from town. When she saw the children she stopped and asked, "Have you seen my papa go by?"
"M-m-m," said Pippi. "How did he look? Did he have blue eyes?"
"Yes," said the girl.
"Medium large, not too tall and not too short?"
"Yes," said the girl.
"Black hat and black shoes?"
"Yes, exactly," said the girl eagerly.
"No, that one we haven't seen," said Pippi decidedly. ~ Astrid Lindgren

Love is when you have not been home for three months and call up home and your daughter picks up the phone and says "Papa, I love you! ~ Avijeet Das

Tadas was sent to the principal today," announced Jonas at dinner. He wedged a huge piece of sausage into his small mouth.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because he talked about hell," sputtered Jonas, juice from the plump sausage dribbling down his chin.
"Jonas, don't speak with your mouth full. Take smaller pieces," scolded Mother.
"Sorry," said Jonas with his moth stuffed. "It's good." He finished chewing. I took a bite of sausage. It was warm and the skin was deliciously salty.
"Tadas told one of the girls that hell is the worst place ever and there's no escape for all eternity."
"Now why would Tadas be talking of hell?" asked Papa, reaching for the vegetables.
"Because his father told him that if Stalin comes to Lithuania, we'll all end up there. ~ Ruta Sepetys

Papa was right, after all. A ship's crew was like a family, and together we had done what we never could have managed alone. ~ Heather Vogel Frederick