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“Isn’t that what you say in America? Just go with the flow.…�� Roy laughed again, loud enough for the people at the next table to turn around. Only the magic was gone out of it now; it sounded hollow, as if it were traveling across a vast, empty distance.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Kyle was a good kid; he still cared about something. Would that be enough to save him?”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Beautiful, aren’t they?�� Dr. Collier said. “They really are.�� “The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it’s coming sooner all the time.�� “What change is that?�� “When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“As I watched the two of them disappear into dusk, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Behind me, Billie was on her last song. I picked up the refrain, humming a few bars. Her voice sounded different to me now. Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn’t there before.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“You wanna know what your real problem is? You always think everything’s about you. You’re just like Reggie and Marcus and Steve and all the other brothers out here. The rally is about you. The speech is about you. The hurt is always your hurt. Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Obama. It’s not just about you. It’s never just about you. It’s about people who need your help. Children who are depending on you. They’re not interested in your irony or your sophistication or your ego getting bruised. And neither am I.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I hadn’t grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“He’s basically a good man. But he doesn’t know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can’t know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They’ve seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like. That’s why he can come over here and drink my whiskey and fall asleep in that chair you’re sitting in right now. Sleep like a baby. See, that’s something I can never do in his house. Never. Doesn’t matter how tired I get, I still have to watch myself. I have to be vigilant, for my own survival.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge? There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Of course it hurt,�� he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California, where he enrolled at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn’t contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed long enough for my mother to finish high school.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Everyone was in a festive mood, eating and drinking to the sounds of a slack-key guitar, when a white man abruptly announced to the bartender, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that he shouldn’t have to drink good liquor “next to a nigger.�� The room fell quiet and people turned to my father, expecting a fight. Instead, my father stood up, walked over to the man, smiled, and proceeded to lecture him about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man. “This fella felt so bad when Barack was finished,�� Gramps would say, “that he reached into his pocket and gave Barack a hundred dollars on the spot. Paid for all our drinks and puu-puus for the rest of the night—and your dad’s rent for the rest of the month.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Whenever I first reached them on the phone, they would often be suspicious or evasive, uncertain as to why this Muslim—or worse yet, this Irishman, O’Bama—wanted a few minutes of their time.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“At”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I mean, things were tough when I was coming up, but there were limits. We’d get high, get into fights. But out in public, at home, if an adult saw you getting loud or wild, they would say something. And most of us would listen, you know what I’m saying? “Now, with the drugs, the guns—all that’s disappeared. Don’t take a whole lot of kids carrying a gun. Just one or two. Somebody says something to one of ’em, and—pow!—kid wastes him. Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to talk to these young cats out here. We”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“This dual sense of individual advancement and collective decline that I thought accounted for some of the most troubling attitudes I heard in some conversations.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“What’s the trick? the man asks. The trick is not caring that it hurts.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility—their own, that of others—slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I found god in myself and I loved her / I loved her fiercely           Lights”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it’s my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won’t depend on them, and they won’t depend on me.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“the resilience they had both displayed, the same stubborn strength that had lifted them out of bad circumstances. Except in Auma I had also sensed a willingness to put the past behind her, a capacity to somehow forgive, if not necessarily forget.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I don’t think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance