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“Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. That”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The trick is not caring that it hurts.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to talk to these young cats out here. We start generalizing about ’em just like the white folks do. We see ’em hanging out, we head the other way. After a while, even the good kid starts realizing ain’t nobody out here gonna look out for him. So he figures he’s gonna have to look after himself. Bottom line, you got twelve-year-olds making their own damn rules.�� Johnnie”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew—Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq—fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own—my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“There was something to what he said, for it was true that the people I met on the job were generally much older than me, with a set of concerns and demands that created barriers to friendship. When I wasn’t working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books. I”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,�� I told Francis. “You are probably right,�� he said. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Orang takkan pernah terlalu sibuk untuk memahami asalnya. --Nenek”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“الاحترام ينبع مما يفعله المرء، وليس من هوية أبيه”
― باراك أوباما, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“A change happens because ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“...communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for Blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“There was poetry as well �� a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Confidence. The secret to a man's success”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Just talk. Yet what concerned me wasn't the damage loose talk caused efforts...,or the emotional pain it caused others. It was the distance between our talk and our action, the effect it was having on us as individuals and as a people.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation; he liked the idea that Unitarians drew on the scriptures of all the great religions (“It’s like you get five religions in one,�� he would say). Toot would eventually dissuade him of his views on the church (“For Christ’s sake, Stanley, religion’s not supposed to be like buying breakfast cereal!��),”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“And under the fanning shade of the mango tree, as hands wove black curls into even rows, I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story ��.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened, a nation busy developing itself. As her circle of Indonesian friends widened, a few of them would be willing to tell her other stories—about the corruption that pervaded government agencies, the shakedowns by police and the military, entire industries carved out for the president’s family and entourage. And with each new story, she would go to Lolo in private and ask him: “Is it true?�� He”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan—didn’t self-esteem finally depend on
just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the
final time, that notions of purity—of race or of culture—could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem
than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw’s story and Mr. Marshall’s
story, in Ruby’s story and Rafiq’s; in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Where there is no experience, I believe the wise man is silent.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell—that was one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too. The two pictures collided, leaving me tongue-tied.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope ��. She has the audacity … to make music … and praise God … on the one string … she has left!”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance