Top highlights from Dreams from My Father
The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.
Show this quote
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 that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.
Show this quote
My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.
Show this quote
You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.
Show this quote
That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.
Show this quote
All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we've done to make so many children's hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass - what values we must live by.
Show this quote
I think perhaps education doesnt do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.
Show this quote
But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.
Show this quote
That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.
Show this quote
And then, on September 11, the world fractured.It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow--the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
Show this quote
How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.'Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us.
Show this quote
The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
Show this quote
And that, I suppose, is what I'd been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn't overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn't help you plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.
Show this quote
I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBoiss learning and Baldwins love and Langstons humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt arts redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.
Show this quote
the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...
Show this quote
Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.
Show this quote
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 elses web. Sometimes I think thats why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. Theres a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control.
Show this quote
It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.
Show this quote
Better to be strong,' he [Lolo] said...'if you can't be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who's strong. But always better to be strong yourself.
Show this quote
There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.
Show this quote
It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow. Words, and the sentiments words carried.
Show this quote
Winter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome -- black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds
Show this quote
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.
Show this quote
The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.
Show this quote
You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate.
Show this quote
all the education and good intentions in the world couldnt help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.
Show this quote
This pleased Onyango, for to him knowledge was the source of all the white man's power, and he wanted to make sure that his son was as educated as any white man.
Show this quote
A Disavowal of the pursuit of Middleclassness', the heading read. While it is permissible to chase middleincomeness with all our might, the text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the psychological entrapment of Black middleclassness that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of we and they instead of 'US'!
Show this quote
Were never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because were bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their livesalthough thats what we tell ourselvesbut because were wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.
Show this quote
Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work.
Show this quote
The title of Reverend Wrights sermon that morning was The Audacity of Hope.
Show this quote
Change won't come from the top, Change will come from mobilized grassroots.
Show this quote
All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.
Show this quote
I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.
Show this quote
How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?
Show this quote
In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self-- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass-- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.
Show this quote
Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endureand make music that wasn't there before.
Show this quote
Youre not going to college to get educated. Youre going there to get trained. Theyll train you to want what you dont need. Theyll train you to manipulate words so they dont mean anything anymore. Theyll train you to forget what it is that you already know. Theyll train you so good, youll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. Theyll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you youre a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then theyll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but youre a nigger just the same.
Show this quote
It wasnt a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.
Show this quote
Churches won't work with you, though, just out of the goodness of their hearts. They'll talk a good game-a sermon on Sunday, maybe, or a special offering for the homeless. But if push comes to show, they won't really move unless you can show them how it'll help them pay their heating bill.
Show this quote
A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. Its what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.
Show this quote
Di Indonesia, kekuasaan diperlihatkan secara terang-terangan, tidak pandang bulu, terbuka, selalu segar dalam ingatan.
Show this quote
perhaps thats how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if were lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.
Show this quote
Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity -- of schedules and pastimes ad the weather -- became their principal consolation.
Show this quote
And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.
Show this quote
I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us werent interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.
Show this quote
I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.
Show this quote
But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldnt read and couldnt get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a childonly, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veinsand why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldnt avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.
Show this quote
In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I wont 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.
Show this quote
Had to be here to understand, he had said. Hed meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in my shoes, an older black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled ambitions, of ambitions abandoned before theyve been tried. I asked myself if I could truly understand that. I assumed, took for granted, that I could. Seeing me, these men had made the same assumption.
Show this quote
The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing peoples psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed. Im not a poet, Barack. Im an organizer.
Show this quote
When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one hed expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry.
Show this quote
And if the high didnt solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the worlds ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.
Show this quote
The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.
Show this quote
I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.
Show this quote
Semakin aku mengenal sistem, semakin aku yakin bahwa reformasi pendidikan adalah satu-satunya solusi bagi remaja bermasalah di luar sana. Tanpa keluarga yang stabil, tanpa prospek mendapatkan pekerjaan bergengsi yang akan membantu keuangan keluarga, pendidikan adalah harapan terbesar mereka.
Show this quote
As she spoke, her voice never wavered; it was the voice of someone who has forced a larger meaning out of tragedy. Or
Show this quote
Bagaimana bisa Amerika mengirimkan orangnya ke ruang angkasa, namun masih membuat batasan bagi penduduknya yang berkulit hitam?
Show this quote
.
,
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Show this quote
How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes? This
Show this quote