Dreams from My Father Quotes

“I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father's pain. My questions were my brothers' questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment. She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“This was it, I thought to myself. My inheritance. I rearranged the letters in a neat stack and set them under the registry book. Then I went out into the backyard. Standing before the two graves, I felt everything around me—the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky—closing in, until I was left with only a series of mental images, Granny’s stories come to life.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“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

“The more interviews I did, the more I began to hear certain recurring themes.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Well,” he said, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like the rest of these young cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do. And the people who are old enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college—they’re just so happy to see you in there that they won’t tell you the truth. The real price of admission.” “And what’s that?” “Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Honesty—Lolo should not have hidden the refrigerator in the storage room when the tax officials came, even if everyone else, including the tax officials, expected such things. Fairness—the parents of wealthier students should not give television sets to the teachers during Ramadan, and their children could take no pride in the higher marks they might have received. Straight talk—if you didn’t like the shirt I bought you for your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up at the bottom of your closet. Independent judgment—just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn’t mean you have to do it too.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father's before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Honest, decent men and women with attainable ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won't do much worse than he did.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“You must be angry about something."
"What do you mean by that?"
He shrugged. "I don't know what exactly. But something. Don't get me wrong - anger's a requirement for the job. The only reason anybody decides to become an organizer. Well-adjusted people find more relaxing work.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“His eyes glowed inward as he spoke, the eyes of a madman or a saint.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“I took my first tentative steps with my eyes closed, down, up, my arms swinging, the voices lifting. And I hear him still: As I follow my father into the sound, he lets out a quick shout, bright and high, a shout that leaves much behind and reaches out for more, a shout that cries for laughter.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“If everyone is family, then no one is family.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another—the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Упевненість. То таємниця чоловічого успіху”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“persona que fue la única constante en mi vida. Gracias a mis hijas veo, día tras día, su alegría y su enorme curiosidad. No voy a intentar describir cuánto lloro aún su muerte. Sé que fue el espíritu más bondadoso y generoso que jamás he conocido y que lo mejor de mí se lo debo a ella. INTRODUCCIÓN”
― Barack Obama, Los sueños de mi padre: Una historia de raza y herencia

“such talk smacked of the explanations that whites had always offered for black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not genetic inferiority, then cultural weakness. It was a message that ignored causality or fault, a message outside history, without a script or plot that might insist on progression. For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen, the testimony of what we saw every day seemed only to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“If more people spoke up, perhaps things might change.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“They chanted and stomped and swore to never leave”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shoes, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas – survival, and freedom, and hope.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“She’s happy now she’s met someone. And I have my work.” “Is that enough?” “Sometimes.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance