Dreams from My Father Quotes

“We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“It’s sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, and worried about him, I was glad not to have to live with him. I just left him to himself and never looked back.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Don’t be thick, all right? I’m not just talking about one time. Look, I ask Monica out, she says no. I say okay … your shit’s not so hot anyway.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

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

“That’s the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it.” She”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.”
― 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.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!           I”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening. My”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. Burdens”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“the world was shrinking, sympathies changing;”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think—the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do. I”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“For my grandfather, race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would be catching up soon.           In”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others,”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“It’s going to take a while to rebuild manufacturing out here,” he said. “Ten years, minimum. But once we get the unions involved, we’ll have a base to negotiate from. In the meantime, we just need to stop the hemorrhage and give people some short-term victories. Something to show people how much power they have once they stop fighting each other and start going after the real enemy.” “And who’s that?” Marty shrugged. “The investment bankers. The politicians. The fat cat lobbyists.” Marty”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person. I”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The result is autobiographical, although whenever someone’s asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I’ve usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here.”
― 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.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact. I had little time for reflection over”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Kalau mereka tidak berakar pada tradisi mereka sendiri, mereka tak akan mampu menghargai kebudayaan orang lain.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“nasionalisme terurai dalam sikap belaka dan bukan program konkret, setumpuk keluhan dan bukan kekuatan yang terorganisasi, gambar dan bunyi yang memadati gelombang udara dan percakapan, namun tanpa perwujudan jasadi.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance