My Papi Quotes & Sayings

Papi chose to be invisible today so you won't ever have to be. — Meg Medina

The bike would be finished this
summer and Papi would be fine, and Janice and all the
other concerned medical professionals could take their
long-term care facility and shove it, while the rest of us
ate empanadas and laughed about that one summer Papi
almost lost his mind. — Sarah Ockler

They say you can never step into the same river twice. And maybe that's how it was for Papi now, memories shifting and re-forming soundlessly beneath him while the rest of us sat on the shore and watched. — Sarah Ockler

Papi looked down at the side-view mirror, at the pine branches sticking out from behind the truck, and every time Rocio raised her voice, singing and screaming at the same time, it felt like the front seats were flooding with water. — Mario Alberto Zambrano

Big Papi placed among the top five in Most Valuable Player balloting during his first five seasons with the Red Sox. His best finish in that span was second place in 2005, just losing out to Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees. It was A-Rod, however, who suggested he'd gladly trade his hardware for the ring Ortiz won in 2004. A-Rod got the hardware for MVP again in 2007, but it was Ortiz who got another ring. — Tucker Elliot

Mami had no choice but to tell Carlito and me the real story that same night.

In a way, I always knew something like that had happened. It was the only way to explain why my older brother got such special treatment his whole life - everyone scared to demand that he go to school, that he study, that he have better manners, that he stop pushing me around.

El Pobrecito is what everyone called him, and I always wondered why.

I was two years younger and nobody, and I mean nadie, paid me any mind, which is why, when our mother told me the story of our father trying to kill his son like we were people out of the Bible, part of me wished our papi had thrown me off that bridge instead. — Patricia Engel

How much English do you know? None, Papi said after a moment. Eulalio shook his head. Papi met Eulalio last and liked him least. — Junot Diaz

On the walk home he asks her, "How was training today, my angel?" As he looks down into her beautiful, ice blue eyes he marvels at her beauty. Her long, black hair, fair skin and eye color are a striking difference next to his tan skin, brown eyes and black hair. Elina heaves a huge sigh, "I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I do nothing right. Today, I was able to project farther than ever. It was amazing, Papi! — Lynn Landes

The tears in my pus-filled eyes became a thousand little crystals of ever color. Like stained-glass windows, I thought. God is with you today, Papi! In the midst of nature's monstrous elements, in the wind, the immenseness of the sea, the depth of the waves, the imposing green roof of the bush, you feel your own infinitesimal smallness, and perhaps it's here, without looking for Him, that you find God, that you touch Him with your finger. I had sensed Him at night during the thousands of hours I had spent buried alive in dank dungeons without a ray of sun; I touched Him today in a sun that would devour everything too weak to resist it. I touched God, I felt Him around me, inside me. He even whispered in my ear: You will suffer; you will suffer more. But this time I am on your side. You will be free. You will, I promise you. — Henri Charriere

A lot of people say, 'Wow, you're a single father of twin boys, that's crazy!' Two toddlers can get hectic, but I wouldn't change it for anything. Every day they teach me different things. The love is there. When you have a two-year-old saying every other hour, 'Papi, te amo. Papi, I love you,' it can't get better. — Ricky Martin

received his recent letters, Franz said, "That's strange, I've written to you so often." He spoke cryptically, using slang. "I've been on the horn with Papi. He hasn't been able to raise Madi since the Frogs packed it in." "I tried her from Villars," Alex replied. "The maid said they were on the road." She thought of what Polly had suggested about a bolt hole. "Maybe they decided to stay down south for a while." "I would go to find them, but I'm stuck here until the end of next term. — Harriet Segal

With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all. — Diane Guerrero

But love gets in the way of her paper flowers, love keeps them secret from Papi. Chabella and Papi have ways of looking at each other, ways of touching that are full of stunned caution. They trip over each other constantly, marvel each time. When Mami sits down at the table, wiping her hands on her cooking skirt after she's set dishes down before us, Papi takes her hand, strokes her fingers, says her name as if he's asking it. Mami nods at him; her lips smile, her eyes smile. I grew up doubting that anyone would ever look at me in the same way. My doubt contains no great trauma; it's casual, the way people doubt they can jump off a bridge and fly. — Helen Oyeyemi

Why? Why should the bond between a people and their baseball team be so intense? Fenway Park is a part of it, offering a physical continuum to the bond, not only because Papi can stand in the same batter's box as Teddy Ballgame, but also because a son might sit in the same wooden-slat seat as his father. — Tom Verducci

And what if many-even if most-of the Slothropian stars are proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud's, back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability-all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically. You must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this. — Thomas Pynchon

Seemingly every year at least one of the league's top sluggers can be found in Boston's lineup - and often times more than one. David Ortiz was second or third in slugging five consecutive seasons from 2003-07. Manny Ramirez was in the top five in slugging six consecutive seasons from 2001-06. Manny and Big Papi were one-two in slugging in 2004, and from 2003-06 Boston's big bats gave the club two of the league's top five sluggers - something no other team in the league could boast. — Tucker Elliot