Flip Book Excerpts

Enjoy a New Way to Discover and Read The Legacy Letters!

Enjoy reading two-page these excerpts from the award-winning book, The Legacy Letters, as if it was actually in your hands! Just click on the excerpt you want to read and it will open up as an “actual” book. You can even hear the pages turn!

These excerpts are an appetizer of the practical, inspirational, spiritual, and romantic letters to be found throughout book. I hope these excerpts help inspire you to ultimately read all of The Legacy Letters—by hardback, e-book, or whatever medium suits your fancy. Enjoy!

Carew Papritz
author of The Legacy Letters

Who will you be, my Little Ones?
“Who will you be, my Little Ones? Will you dance for the fires of your youth and run at midnight to water’s edge, diving into summer’s heat? Will you ride a wild mare to any thought or dream or love of your making? Will you seek the artistry of your own infatuations and explore…”

Your Pappy’s Love of Books and All Appearances of the Mother Tongue
“Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized…”

The Everything and Nothing of Money
“So, if the truest currency of life is time, then how do you get more time? Because if more is merrier, than having more time should make us more happier. Right? Therefore, all we have to ask ourselves is can we buy more time?…”

The Art of Work and Working
“Make doing your best a habit, and you’ll never know not doing your best. If you build roads, then build them Roman—make them last two thousand years. Dig ditches as if you were taking them to the state fair to win another blue ribbon for best ditches…”

Wind now sweeping over my bare back.
“I wish I could wrap up the glitter star-green of this moment and hand it to you like an angel gift. Give you the heat lightning flying in jagged silence over the distant mountains. And the smell of September prairie grass and the even fainter scent of October pine now descending…”

Birthing and Raising Kids
“Teach them what you love to do in life. It really doesn’t matter what it is. It never does. Just show them how important a passion is…”

How utterly utterly small we are under this magnificent star canopy.
“My God, what a sensation to be an atom in the scheme of such grandiosity. The allurement, the jazz, and the physics of it all…”

Travel the World “I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends. I travel for the jolting, angelic act of seeking strangeness and newness and profoundness…”

When You’re Eighteen, Don’t Read This “Remember, it’s still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you’d have nothing to look forward to. Besides, to be wise and eighteen is as possible as catching lightning in a bottle…”

I want to have so many memories of you. “I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink… how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep…”

I give to you our vows . . . Our wedding vows. “I promise to dream with you both great dreams and small dreams. To ask your counsel in times of uncertainty. To honor your silence when you seek to be alone. To be ever wondrous at your curiosities and revelations. And to be ever rejuvenated by your passions…”

This is how I want to remember . . . Summer “Summer, dropping so easily a delicious everything upon your skin and lips. Like a never-ending kiss—taunting, deep, and luscious. The sun. The heat. The thousand echoes of a timelessness before time, when every day seems longer than the next and no day seems likely to ever truly end. Summer.”

Starting the Day “Starting the day—Another chance to be new again. How many of us still wish for that? To be your own sunrise. To awaken like a prayer—both solemn and joyful at still being alive…”

On My Boy Becoming a Man “No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a man and a boy. Because you are either one or the other, but you are not both…”