Rising Star Quotes

“Barack went on to explain that “there was a voice inside me that I could hear that was true—a kernel of myself—this is from a Borges poem—sort of a love poem to a mistress of his,” one that Jorge Luis Borges had written in 1934. “He says ‘I offer you that kernel of myself that is basically untouched, doesn’t traffic in the trivial or the petty or is just there’” (a close rendition of Borges’s declaration, “I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities”). Barack told Weisberg, “I felt that. That sounds like god to me,” and “to me god is connection . . . making connections, and in that connection, that’s where I find god.”
― David Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“A Springfield “horseshoe” was an often grotesque open-faced sandwich in which a piece of meat was covered first with french fries and then with a cheeselike sauce. Visitors knowledgeable enough to avoid the local delicacy felt rightfully proud. The statement that Springfield was a city of “bad hotels and worse food” was perhaps apocryphal, but there was no shortage of bars, because drinking was state politicos’ top recreational activity.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Obama also realized that the beer drinking, pot smoking, and cocaine snorting that Oxy, like Punahou, offered him, and that had cemented his reputation as “a hard-core party animal” to some friends, was incompatible with any self-transformation into a more serious student and person.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Gay liberation was not part of the Comparative Politics course, but Goldyn drew “a good-sized crowd” one evening during that term when he spoke on gay activism, and a column he wrote for the student newspaper ended by declaring that “the point of liberation, sexual or otherwise, is to rewrite the rules.” Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“As a prominent African American, Chicago-based theologian who worshiped in the same church later emphasized, above all else, including color, complexion, and race, first and foremost Barack “Obama is Hawaiian.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Kakugawa knew that Barry “was going through a tough time” that spring and was experiencing a lot of “inner turmoil,” but “it wasn’t a race thing . . . Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is bullshit.” The crux of what his friend was wrestling with was “the hurt he felt about being abandoned by his mother” on top of his long-absent father.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“young Barack spent most of his time with his fit and youthful forty-five-year-old grandfather.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Barack confessed that “during the course of campaigning” “sometimes you lose” your “core truthfulness” and “it becomes a performance”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Only an extreme control freak would withhold his academic transcripts from public view simply so as to avoid any public discussion of what possible ideological influence either Walder’s impressive reading list or Len Davis’s teaching about the political uses of fiction might have had upon an intellectually hungry twenty-one-year-old mind.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Maya Soetoro-Ng declined comment to a reporter, but a family friend explained that “she was furious” over Barack’s comments about their grandmother. His characterization of her “seemed completely gratuitous, even cruel,” one critic rightly thought, and one of the late Stanley Dunham’s close friends acidly remarked, “I have a far better opinion of both Stan and Madelyn than I have heard from Barry’s speeches.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“money is the original sin in politics and I am not sinless.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President